Years of Pilgrimage

[MethodicalSlacker]

Dana Schmidt is standing alone. She is five foot nine inches tall. She weighs one hundred and fifty pounds. The color of her hair is auburn. The color of her eyes is brown. She is wearing a beige cardigan over a blue t-shirt and black jeans. She also is wearing black vans with the laces torn out. She is standing in the middle of a crowded town square, a buoy bobbing in a sea of people. She does not recognize this town, but from the whiteness of the stone the buildings are made of and the seagulls overhead she feels as though she is somewhere in Greece. It is Modern Greece, but the people wear a mix of the clothing she is used to seeing and togas. They speak a language that she can readily identify as something that is not Greek because she took Greek for a semester. Her purse is missing. She stares up at the sky, and sun. It is bright.

Something catches her eye. Hurtling across the sky at an incredibly high speed is a black dot, too far away to clearly make out. Dana looks around the group of people to see if anyone else has noticed that there is a black dot in the sky. Strangely, though several people have their gazes turned up to the sky, none of them are looking in the direction of the dot. Dana lifts a hand to tap someone on the shoulder. She stops herself; she does not speak their language. Gradually, the square empties of people, and Dana is left standing alone in the center. For some reason, she finds herself unable to move. She looks back up at the sky and notices that the dot has stopped moving. It is growing larger.

It is coming towards her, and now she can see what it is; a small black bird with a black beak and a glowing red eye, talons outstreched. She tries to move, but cannot budge. As the bird grows nearer, she manages to avert her eyes before it makes impact.

Except it does not merely strike her. It rakes its talons over her arms, cutting through her clothing and slicing apart her skin. She cries out in pain. Blood begins to seep from the wound instantly, pouring off of her arm and staining the polished white surface of the ground. The bird turns midair—no, it does not turn, it inverts, the back and front shifting around to each other's places—and comes back for her, slicing again, this time across her chest. She cannot move. The bird continues, pivoting, slicing, inverting, clawing, Dana's flesh sliced into pieces, red pouring from her until she can no longer speak as well, fully conscious and aware of the dives and turns of the bird as it almost becomes a part of her, its nerves becoming her own, and she can control which ways it hurts her, but it only hurts her, almost whittling her down the bone, the shots of pain and the aching that follows becoming as mundane as breathing. She stands here for what feels like an eternity. It takes seven minutes for her to be reduced to muscle.

And then Dana wakes up.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"This album sucks."

"Does not."

"Does too."

"Does not."

"It's really bad, Terry. I don't understand what you like about it. It's really grating and like, it sounds really ugly, and it's just one big meme. I don't know why you like it so much if there's nothing to connect to emotionally."

"It's not a meme, though, each song does something totally different, it's all these different styles, the band members have a lot of good chemistry with each other, and anyways it's just like each one of these songs is a banger—"

"Banger's a fuckin' buzzword."

"I know, Dana, we've had that conversation before—"

"Banger's a buzzword and if you use it again I'm going to knock out your teeth."

"Sure."

"It does a lot of styles but it doesn't really do any of them really well. The vocals are just as shit on every song, and the lyrics are just this self-deprecating nihilistic twenty first century garbage. It's just like 'oh well I spent all my money and I'm laying in bed all day being a worthless piece of shit look at me being so cutesy useless and worthless ell em aye oh ecks deeeeee' it's fucking garbage Terry and you know it's garbage. It's ironic Twitter garbage, like—"

"Dana—"

"Like you got a bunch of fucking twitter people, like Dril and all the weird twitter fuckers, and put them in a room and gave them instruments, just those people with that general sense of humor, then this is the kind of shit they'd make."

"But the lyrics aren't the point, the lyrics aren't it, it's the production—"

"THE PRODUCTION IS EVEN WORSE. Oh my god, it's just, fucking, you listen to it and it's this tinny fucking garbage, everything is so ugly and warped and fucking, this song? The bass on this song? It peaks. EVERY TIME. It just keeps peaking and peaking, and when you have this mix of terrible garbage lyrics and PC Music production—because let's be fucking straight here, let's get this on record, this shit is PC Music, you agree, it is PC Music and all PC Music generally has this warped fucking grossness going on where it's just tinny and ugly like this, like it's cacaphony, really pitchy high-end mixing that hurts your ears—"

"Well—"

"—kind of person that goes out there and without a shred of irony or self-decency calls themselves a smohl ooo-woo bean with one of those fucking disgusting emoticon faces—"

"—well I think—"

"—it just sort of turns me off, really hard. There's nothing elegant or well put together about this, it's just garbage."

"DANA IF YOU WOULD LET ME FINISH I would just want to say that they had a goal and they set out to do it and they did it really well, and all this is is is its is its it is a bunch of fun pop songs that are weird and strange, and that's all it needs to be because that's what they wanted it to be and that's just how things are."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"...Dana?"

"Hitler."

"Excuse me?"

"Hitler had a goal, right? He set out to take the people he thought were terrible, and lesser, and bad, and he killed a bunch of them. I'd say he did pretty well at that goal, right? Killed millions of fucking people. He did that goal really well, right? So it must mean that what he did was good, right?"

"Of fucking course not Dana that's—"

"WELL THEN WHY THE FUCK DO YOU SAY THAT THEN? YOU are comPLETELY FUCKING FORGETTING THE WHOLE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR SHIT WE WENT OVER LAST FUCKING WEEK WHERE I EVEN SAID TO YOU I LOOKED YOU IN THE EYES AND I SAID THAT author INTENTIONS don't FUCKING MATTER. IF I SET OUT TO TAKE A FUCKING SHIT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD—"

"—Dana you should really quiet down—"

"—in the middle of the fucking street, Terry, and I do it, then that's a masterpiece, because I had a goal and I did it. I didn't strive for better and neither did the people that made this album. They set out to do something obnoxious and bad, something fucking worthless, and here it is, they did it, congratufuckinglations. That's how I feel about it."

"Well, okay. I'm not going to force you to like it. That's just what you feel, and—"

"—Terry."

"What?"

"Are we not having a debate, here?"

"...what?"

"You can't just give up like that. That's no fun. We're having a debate."

"What do you mean a debate we were just talking."

"Arguing. You can't just back out of it like that. We were in the middle of things."

"Um."

"It's, well, wait, did you not having a debate?"

"No! I thought, we were just talking about music from this year, I didn't want to have a debate about it or anything like that—"

"You didn't think over the course of that conversation where we basically numerically went over the pros and cons of the album and what you thought were merits and I thought were, uh, dismerits, or how about let's say faults, and you sat there and talked to me for a while and you didn't think to say that it was a debate and you didn't want to have a debate, not once?"

"No, you, um,"

"You really shouldn't lead me on like that Terry. You know I like debates. For you, for you to tease me like that, ugh, Terry, I don't even want to talk to you anymore tonight."

"I just don't want to force you to like it."

"Don't force me, convince me."

"That's dumb!"

"Why? Isn't the point of a debate to reach a new understanding? To convince the other person that you're right? What's the point in even ever talking to anybody if that isn't what you're going to do?"

"Dana, you just don't fucking understand people. You just don't."

"Terry.

"You're boring."

[MethodicalSlacker]

Dana Schmidt is standing in an airport terminal. She is seventeen years old. She is wearing a red blouse and a black skirt. She is part of a class trip somewhere. Washington DC. Her best friends are here. Terry. Stephen. Gerry. All here. They are standing in the middle of a busy airport terminal. The rest of the class is here, but their faces have turned gray. The flight has been delayed, and they have a layover in the city in which the airport is located. The group is lead out of the main terminal and down a hallway with a polished floor that reflects Dana's face when she looks downwards almost perfectly. Terry tugs at her shirt sleeve and tells her to hurry up. Dana does not notice that just a few moments ago she did not have shirt sleeves.

The surroundings of the airport become less dense with people and far more ornate. A tall glass door stretching upwards an almost incomprehensible distance—not one incredibly far, just one that Dana has a hard time discerning—leads the way to a lounge. The class is lead through. Dana and her friends gawk at the comforts inside. The walls are a beige and blue mix of marble textures that sparkle in the light coming off of the glass chandeliers pendant above. A large television screen adorns one end of the room, showing a video game that several members of the class run over to go play. It is one that Dana recognizes, but feels uneasy around. It can't be from this time. It just can't. It strikes her as more odd than the door, or the cancellation, or, as she is now noticing, the fact that every time she looks down she is wearing a different set of clothing. On the other end of the room is an ornate fountain, spewing water into a basin. Stephen is here, now, leading Dana over to the television. He places a controller in her hand. Dana understands how to play the game almost instantly, and does generally better than the rest of her classmates and peers. At first they are in awe of her skill. Then, they go oddly silent. Eerily silent. There is no natural light in this room.

The class is shortly after informed by an airport employee that they will be staying the night in the hotel adjoined to the airport, and that their bags have been taken care of. Dana blinks and a day has passed. Her luggage is next to her, and she is to board the plane. The only one of her friends left in the group is Gerry. Dana, suspicious at what has been going on, asks Gerry where Terry and Stephen are. He doesn't know either and simply shrugs. Dana, distressed breaks off from the group and goes searching for her friends. Through a series of winding corridors, she finds herself in a cargo terminal leading into the plane that the group is to board, a canary yellow small passenger plane made to take off from an indoor runway suspended above the actual ground. Dana has never heard of a plane taking off from indoors before. She follows the cargo terminal down until she sees, from a window, her classmates boarding the plane. Terry is among them, but not Stephen. Feeling a rush of excitement, Dana runs down the corridor until she makes it inside the plane.

She does not get a chance to say anything to her friends, however. Instead, she finds that she is seated in a side compartment of the plane, a column of single seats separated from the main group by a wall. A partition. She is the only one seated here. The seats are gray. The walls are a darker gray. Dana cannot perceive the clothes that she is wearing. Outside the many porthole windows, she can see the metal walls of the interior runway. The plane begins to take off, and Dana puts on her seat-belt. She cannot tell how long the runway is from the side view she has out of the plane. There is a hole in the sky called the Earth. The planes wheels are leaving the runway, now. Dana feels something rise in her chest, a whole family of moths fluttering around in her stomach. She doesn't like flying, she decides.

Suddenly, the plane slows. It has been flying for a few seconds only, but it gained substantial height, even though it is inside a giant corridor. Dana, confused, looks around and then outside. Oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, and the plane stalls out further, and, strangely, begins to spin. Not in a nosedive, but horizontally, it turns and turns and turns, slow and then quickly much faster until Dana has trouble finding her balance on the grayish blue carpeted floor. She tries the door back into the main seating area but finds that there is no knob to pull on. Frantically, she looks around for some way out of the side area. The windows won't budge. The plane spins faster and faster and faster. Then, Dana notices that at the far end of the seating area the exterior wall curves in with the side of the plane, terminating in a narrow crevice between a window and the wall. Dana stumbles over, feeling along the side of the wall to stay upright, until she makes it to the window. In its reflection she can see red lights flashing, both inside and outside the plane. She grits her teeth, and sticks her head in the crevice, getting it stuck just enough that out of the corner of her left eye she can see out the window. The plane is spinning wildly now, and rapidly descending. Dana lets out a scream as an alarm starts to blare louder than anything she has ever heard, rocking the very foundation of the world. The space becomes tighter, getting her stuck. Tension is placed on the inside of her head. She hears over the alarm a sound like glass cracking, but sees no damage on the window. The plane keeps falling, falling, falling...

Until it isn't falling anymore. It sets down gently on the bottom of the runway and stays there, the spinning stopping almost instantly. The red lights no longer flash. The alarm no longer sounds. Dana is safe. Feeling a wave of relief wash over her, Dana closes her eyes and lets out the deepest sigh she has ever given.

And then Dana wakes up.

[MethodicalSlacker]

that's Dana Schmidt right what sitting on the couch kinda falling over yeah that's her why you heard about what happened with her sister and their class didn't you is she like gonna be okay maybe she shouldn't be here dude i mean how many beers has she had nah its not our job to be the police Dana can do whatever she wants besides that can't be more than her second or third she'll be fine and her friend Terry is here who Terry Lee yeah Terry Lee can watch her back just fine she doesn't drink and she's right over there see on the couch next to her oh I see I guess it's not our business then right well yeah but Terry Lee's been talking to someone else this entire time and hasn't really been paying attention and Dana looks kinda spacey maybe someone put something in her drink woah man I think you're onto something we should go over and check it out maybe sit next to her yeah that sounds good I know gotta watch out for her make sure she's safe right yeah yeah yeah so why haven't you gone over yet what do you mean why haven't you gone over yet well I mean she's just kind of staring off into space right yeah so and I mean she looks really intense yeah right and so what's the big deal you're not hitting on her man you're doing the opposite yeah but she looks faded dude I don't know if I feel comfortable taking on that responsibility and I don't even talk to her ever what aren't you two in the same philosophy class well yeah but she doesn't sit with me she sits kind of alone how can you sit alone in that class it's full and it's not set up that you could be alone I took it last semester and it's still in the same room right what room it was in the science building why would philosophy be in the science building look dude I don't know but the point is you have to be at least sort of familiar well she does message me on facebook to see if I have the homework sometimes hold on a sec I gotta grab another beer alright okay I'm back what's up I was just saying how she hits me up to check for the homework sometimes well see that's your inroad stop talking her up like I'm going to ask her out yeah well I don't know you're the one getting all concerned and whatever woah hold on when did she finish that can dude do you think all those on the ground are hers nah can't be that's way too much and she's not alone other people are sitting on the arms of the couch they could be tossing it over their shoulders or whatever or just leaving it there as she goes back yeah let's just make sure she doesn't get up to get another one good idea that beats going over and sitting next to her I'd just feel awkward in that scenario hell yeah I know how it is it really do be like that sometimes I guess yeah it do man hey look Terry's going over there wait is that a beer in her hand hey Terry stop hey fuck god dude no okay if Terry's in charge of this then I trust Terry why because they're best friends they've been friends since high school you know Terry yeah I know Terry my roommate dated her freshman year oh cool what was she like very concerned caring individual you know your typical almost granola cruncher I mean totally would be a granola cruncher if born above the Mason Dixon but not because this is y'know so she's just fairly moderately liberal normal person kind of vibes like no real distinct tastes or opinions in things except for strange music that I think she gets from Dana hey yeah didn't Dana have that radio show the Madame Psychosis Radio Hour yeah based off that one that one book yeah you know yeah wasn't it didn't it kind of suck no it was awesome man she has really nutty taste in music shit's wild you'll never hear anything like that ever because you weren't there for it and look at her lately I mean even before this whole thing with the high school kids I know you hate to see it you really do but before that she was kinda spiraling a little yeah I heard she was caught browsing one of those deep web sites in class wait what yeah she's been getting deep into some fringe shit no way dude that's just rumors she was probably torrenting some music or something in class that's against school policy we get federal funding and whatever the fuck yeah I know but she's not the kind of person to go on the chans or whatever what the fuck are 'the chans' Daryl look listen it's not it isn't important I know point is she wouldn't go there apart from music she's totally fine and normal otherwise maybe it was some of her cyberpunk shit oh cyberpunk is neat yeah well if it was that then wait what do you wait what wait hold on maybe go over and talk to her what the fuck man Daryl listen I think you should try it just go talk to her sit with her for a bit she looks lonely could use company and you're already chairman of the Dana Schmidt Madame Psychosis fanclub you might just be what she needs right now Ryan she is piss drunk I am not going over there then I will what I'm going over dude come on what's your problem man hey fuck off neither of us are going there no its either you or me pal fucking why dude because what because what because man I dunno she looks lonely like I said dude what the fuck listen Daryl if you don't go over there I will and that's final people are looking at us weird yeah because you're being a big fucking pussy and you won't go over and sit next to Dana Schmidt of all the people to have a strange time going up to and talking to you pick the weird chick what the fuck the weird chick who plays weird music and has a weird fucking show and gets fucked up on other people's couches when her sister gets kidnapped instead of okay fuck you I'm going over I knew it fuck you it's because I'm sick of your shit whatever man have fun fuck off Ryan bye scuse me pardon me just getting through let me just umph plop down right here oof couch is a little heh softer than I thought it'd be haha y'know this little oasis in the middle of this party I mean it's just what I need right now you know everything else is too hectic and crazy and there's beer pong in the other room I mean holy fuck we're gonna be seniors who even cares about beer pong anymore it's embarrassing am I right


"..."


haha yeah I get it the whole not wanting to talk thing I mean I just kind of showed up out of nowhere and sat down next to you I'm not too close am I it's not the biggest couch in the world but you're sitting smack dab in the middle and I'm okay I'm kinda a big guy well sorta skinnyfat I got wide hips and I just don't want to encroach on your space seeing as um yeah are you alright people are worried about you


"..."


hey Dana can you hear me


"Threeicsahuolenntehskieycaleledheherrf."


what im sorry could you speak up I couldn't hear you louder could you say that again look okay maybe we should get out of hear call Terry over maybe you've had a bit too much to drink and I know the thing's going on and I mean well that's why you're doing this whole thing but don't you think maybe going out and getting drunk isn't the best idea at a time like th

[MethodicalSlacker]

Dana Schmidt is falling backwards in slow motion. She is holding a shotgun in her hands. The shotgun, moments before, has discharged in the direction of her father, who is standing a couple of feet in front of her. Her father is being torn apart before her very eyes by buckshot. Betrayal is in his eyes. Dana does not remember firing the gun. Dana's memories start in this moment, in freefall backwards, just tripping over herself, eyes wide and runny like egg yolks, the faint scent of singed metal filling the air. Dana's father is being torn to shreds. Swiss cheese holes rip themselves in his chest. It lasts seconds. Dana perceives an eternity. Is this her father? Is this really her father? She has trouble placing his face.

She blinks and is somewhere else.

Dana Schmidt is in a supermarket in Ohio with her best friends Terry Lee and Stephen Mills. She is wearing blue latex sterile laboratory gloves and carrying a brown paper bag filled with plastic water bottles and is sneaking out without paying. Terry and Stephen and Dana have uncovered a conspiracy by a leading water bottle manufacturer to infect the population of the United States with alien micro-machines in order to remotely control them in all sorts of ways. Dana and Terry and Stephen are taking the water bottle back to their laboratory in order to study and isolate the machines from the water as the first step in developing a counter-measure for the rest of the population to rid themselves of the machines and to combat the alien menace. As they pass through the automatic doors, they hear a gurgling noise behind them as one of the patrons of the store is forcibly taken over by the machines.

A pregnant woman, wearing a floral print dress garment and flip-flops. Dana looks down and sees herself wearing blue jeans ripped at the knees and a stripped shirt and a jean jacket and sneakers. The gloves are no longer on her hands. She turns towards the road and with Stephen and Terry starts bounding down a hill. The gravity is low here, each jump sending them far into the air, the hill stretching downward and downward lined with houses on either side. A stumbling fleshy noise behind them, the slapping of flesh against shoe sole. There is a white rope connecting the water bottle bag to Dana's hand. The pattering noise behind them slows down and gets further away. Dana bounds ahead and then stops, looking up the hill at the pregnant woman. She is holding her knees and heaving. For a moment, Dana considers taking this blessing and running with it, but something seems wrong.

Suddenly from the chest of the pregnant woman bursts a fully grown two feet tall grotesquely gray colored half-human half-alien baby-toddler covered in blood and red runny fluid, runny like egg yolk, running at full tilt down the hill at a much faster speed than someone of its bodily proportions and age should be able to. Dana turns and sees Terry and Stephen have left her behind. She starts jumping down the hill. Passersby regard her with blank expressions. The baby screams, the lifeless husk of the pregnant woman behind it being pecked apart by a small black bird with a black beak and a glowing red eye. It pays no mind. Each jump brings Dana less and less distance ahead of the baby. Dana screams for help. She lets go of the rope and the bag of water bottles drops to the floor as she lands. If she turned and fought gravity to try and grab for the bag, the baby would catch her. If not, she'd have to return home empty handed. The baby's screams sound like the whistling of a kettle, and then they sound like something else. Something very unique. A screaming sound Dana would recognize anywhere. A screaming sound that fills Dana with disgust and filth and the sense that something inside her needs to burst from her chest and start running far, far away from here, wherever this great big hill is, into the unfathomable beyond.

And then Dana wakes up.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Name: Dana Schmidt
Gender: Female
Age: 21
Grade: Third Year of University
School: University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (formerly Tulane University)
Hobbies and Interests: Painting, collages, obscure Japanese music, radio DJ-ing, singing, casual substance abuse, left-wing politics, podcasts, urban exploration.

Appearance: Dana Schmidt is of English descent and has pale skin, brown eyes, and brown hair. She is 5'9" and weighs around 126 pounds. She has a thin build due in part to her unhealthy eating habits. Very little of her weight is muscle mass. Her face is free of distinguishing marks, such as freckles or scars. Her light brown hair is naturally straight; Dana usually wears it in a bun, electing not to take much care of it otherwise. Her face is roughly heart shaped. Her nose is small and slightly nubbish, and she has lips that are not thick, but not especially thin either. Dana speaks at a decently loud volume, and has no issue projecting her voice. Her voice is at a slightly lower pitch relative to her height than one might expect. She speaks relatively quickly and abruptly, and is prone to intense and sudden changes in her vocal inflection.

Dana usually dresses in punk inspired clothes, though she does not wholly buy into the hardcore aesthetic. Often she mixes and matches t-shirts of obscure bands with black jeans, lightly tormented. Color-wise, she usually dresses in all black. She has a pair of black Dr. Martens boots that she wears with all of her outfits; however, if she is going out exploring, she wears black steel toed work boots. On the day of Violet's abduction, she was wearing a Boredoms T-Shirt, black skinny jeans with tears in the knees, and her Dr. Martens.

Biography: Dana was born in 1996 to Bob and Carol Schmidt, a freelance journalist and an accountant respectively. She has a younger sister named Violet, born just three years after herself. Violet is the quiet, kind type, spending time frequently inside the house while the two were growing up. Violet never got the chance to move out of the house, but since Dana transferred to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga the two began to run into each other fairly often. Before that, the two communicated often on the phone a decent amount of times in a given month. Dana maintains a working relationship with her parents, a notable souring from her youth, as they have vocally disagreed with her lifestyle choices and her decision to transfer out of Tulane. Dana's parents wish that she remained at Tulane because they trust Dana's longtime childhood best friend, Terry Lee, to take care of her, more than they trust Dana to take care of herself.

Dana could be described as snarky and rebellious. She generally assumes the worst of people she meets for the first time, for better or for worse, and her first instinct upon meeting someone new is to question what they want from her. That being said, those closer to her know her to be a caring and compassionate individual, even if that care takes a form that is uniquely Dana's. Dana's bitterness and occasional hostility do not lend themselves to making friendships, and outside of circles dedicated to her interests Dana's social life is kept to only a few individuals. Dana shares with her sister the inability to articulate her passion for her interests in a way that does not alienate others, though this is due to a flair for dramatics and pretension rather than over-explaining the intricacies of her hobbies. She does well enough in school to get by at the University of Chattanooga—however, at Tulane she found herself on academic probation in her Sophomore year, leading to her decision to transfer. She plans on majoring in Communications.

Dana lived a relatively normal childhood up to the age of five years old, when she began to interact with other children in a formalized setting. Dana's unfamiliarity with playground games and tendency to strike out on her own during recess times, along with other weird habits of hers and a generally tomboyish demeanor, lead to her getting bullied and tormented by her Kindergarten classmates. Her teachers did not take her seriously when she attempted to communicate this to them, chalking up her feelings to Dana taking one of her pretend games too far, as she was wont to do at the time. She also began to develop an unrequited crush on a boy in her class that would occasionally participate in her games and spend time with her at the playground. When this boy eventually went with the consensus opinion of Dana's classmates and began to join in on the bullying, Dana reached a breaking point. Having no healthy outlet for her frustration, she turned inwards, directing her anger towards her sister.

At first, Dana would take out her anger in subtle ways. An escalation of roughhousing between the two girls went largely unnoticed by both Dana's parents and Violet herself, though Dana was intentionally making an effort to harm Violet nonetheless. Unsatisfied by this level of rough physical contact, Dana began directing more of her inner feelings at her sister. The two would often play house in the bedroom they shared at the time, an activity that at first her parents supervised but gradually grew to understand as a perfectly harmless way for their daughters to interact, growing less and less concerned to the point where they went from staying in the room to listening from the kitchen downstairs in case anything went wrong. Dana began to insist on playing the Dad of the house, and that Violet was the Mom. She started to hug her sister and kiss her in many places. Violet at first did not think much of this contact, but eventually it grew annoying, and Violet asked her sister to stop. Dana wouldn't. Stop. Dana was bigger than Violet. She would hug her until it hurt, and Violet couldn't move. If Violet moved her mouth away, Dana would scratch her. She didn't know why she felt this way. The bullies only called her names, but they made her feel like she hurt like when she fell and scraped her knee on the ground, on the inside. She wanted someone else to know how it felt. Dana's parents did not consider her a precocious child. She bit Violet on the mouth to hold her in place. On one occasion, Dana sat on her sister's chest to keep her on the ground. Dana did this all several times. Dana did this all several times. Dana did this all several times. Dana did this all several times. Dana did this all several times. Dana did this all several times. Dana did this all several times. Dana did this all several times. Dana did this all several times until one day Carol noticed the two were unusually quiet, and went upstairs to check. Her poor, poor sister. Dana was forcibly separated from Violet. She does not remember this period of her life very well. Dana was placed in emotional counseling, and her parents would discuss what to do about it all in loud voices from the other room. Dana turned seven years old. They were still talking about her. At times she worried if her parents loved her anymore. She knew that they were not happy about what she did. Violet didn't want to play anymore. Violet didn't want to play with anyone. Violet didn't want to touch anything. Her poor, poor sister.




i




By the time Dana was eleven, the two had learned to live with each other again. Dana, through counseling, learned the full extent of the damage she had inflicted on her sister, and how she'd never be the same again. More importantly, though, she learned that she had problems of her own that she needed to work through. Problems that were valid, and concerning. Dana has fond memories of her time in therapy, and believes that it helped orient her in the world in a way that she needed at the time. She wishes that the inciting incident for her entrance into therapy did not come at the expense of her sister, whom she loves very much. But she knows that she is better off for it. Violet eventually came to forgive her sister, and Dana still apologizes for it whenever she believes she has overstepped her bounds and said something she ought not to have said. Dana believes herself to currently be mentally stable, and that the problems caused by being bullied have subsided and gone away. She still, however, deals with disturbing dreams and nightmares.

Dana's parents were careful to ensure that rumors about what had happened between Dana and Violet never got out on a wider scale, and Dana knew not to speak about it to anyone. She tried her best to fit in with her classmates during elementary, middle, and high school, often repressing her interests and pretending to be interested in things that seemed normal in order to make sure that nobody saw her as an other again. At time, this went from necessity to habit. Necessity. Dana did relatively well in her public school years, earning a 'B' average in most of her classes. She excelled in the German class offered in high school, and during the opening to graduation, in which speakers of multiple languages came to the podium and welcomed the assembled families in a variety of languages, Dana was invited to greet them in German.

Dana also did well in her art classes. She found that she had a knack for the fundamentals of art, and through several encouraging art instructors decided to pursue painting. While not adept enough to win any competitions, Dana thoroughly enjoys painting as a healthy outlet for the stress she experiences in her daily life. She enjoys abstract art, though she has been told frequently that her portraits are pleasurable to look at and do a good job of capturing the mood of the subjects she uses in the paintings. Dana has painted Violet on occasion. Dana also does collages, using found pieces of text and images from magazines and newspapers as well as recycled books to create found art pieces. Dana enjoys making collages more than painting, but knows that she is weaker in that discipline than in the domain of the easel and brush. Dana has some collages she does not show anyone. She sometimes experiments with combining collage art and portraits, painting intricate pictures of people and then pasting disturbing words and images over parts of their face. Juxtaposition and context are important in the art making process. Dana has painted Violet on occasion.

A hobby that Dana has had since early on in her childhood unrelated to her academic interests is exploring Chattanooga with her friend Terry Lee. Terry and Dana bonded after the incident with Violet when Dana was in search of healthy social relationships, as advised by her therapist and her parents. After Dana learned that her bullies had moved on to more interesting targets in the couple of weeks that Dana had been absent from school, Dana sat with Terry at lunch because she noticed that Terry was also sitting alone. Terry thought that Dana, though strange, was interesting to talk to. She took a chance on Dana and decided to show her to a place that she called her Hideout, a grounds-keeping shed on the edge of the school play-yard where Terry often went to sit and read during recess. The grounds-keeper was very nice to them. This kindled a desire in Dana to explore more of the world around her. Through middle school, Dana and Terry remained friends, often visiting different parts of Chattanooga together and making a point to explore parts of the city that their classmates did not venture to very often. Limited by the distance from the school they could make it before their parents came to pick them up from the clubs they said they were attended, Dana and Terry did not fully expand their hobby to its full scope until high school, when they were given relatively free reign over the city provided they arrive home before dinner. Some close calls, along the way, in many ways, but mostly one. Both families had a habit of eating late, so this allowed the two to explore the city until roughly nine each night. By the time Dana was a Junior in high school and her parents had allowed her more freedom, Dana had already explored most of the abandoned architecture around the city, with and without Terry.

Violet doesn't want to go exploring with Dana. She says that there are dark energies in the places that Dana likes to hang out. Dana thinks that Violet's hobbies are strange, and odd, and wonders if that's partially her fault. She wondered for a long time if there was something Violet was keeping from her, a hobby stranger than the rest that she hadn't shown anyone yet. Dana did not believe herself to possess generally good intuition, but something about the time Violet would spend in her room with the door locked for hours at a time went beyond the well-known forum posting and witch-crafting that Dana knew her sister was interested in. She would have to wait for a long time before she was proven correct. Nobody was in the house but her at that time. Her parents haven't been taking this well. We're very sorry.

Most of Dana's current interests only began to manifest when she enrolled in college. Dana followed Terry to Tulane University in New Orleans. Nothing about the school interested her in particular, but Dana wanted a fresh social start and the convenience of having a good friend nearby. Terry was happy to have Dana with her, and the two were roommates for the duration of Terry's stay at Tulane. Dana, interested in involving herself with clubs, decided to use one of her sister's interests as a springboard for potential connection; her passion for music. Terry took a music appreciation class and made friends with several of her classmates, letting them show her whatever music they liked. Of all that she saw, Dana found herself strangely taking a liking to music from Japan. It was foreign enough that each record she consumed had an air of mystery, yet familiar enough in its structure that she felt like she knew what to expect. As she grew into her new identity, she began to dress more extremely, eschewing the bland and plain outfits she had come to inhabit in high school in favor of her current, more punk-ish style and attitude.

As her freshman year wore on, Dana, on her sister's recommendation, began to use various websites and message boards to broaden her musical horizons, her tastes growing more and more esoteric relative to her peers. Upon Terry's recommendation—partially out of wanting to see Dana pursue her hobbies as far as she could and partially because she knew that she was not nearly as interested in Dana's music as Dana herself—Dana took a DJ Training class at the university radio station. By the time she was a Sophomore, she had her own radio show; the Madame Psychosis Radio Hour, named after an excerpt from the novel Infinite Jest that Dana had read for an English class and enjoyed. When she transferred to UTC, she took her show with her, copying over her format and general style of featuring her classmates as frequent guests.

Dana transferred for a few reasons. Most of all, Tulane was getting to be too expensive, and Dana increasingly didn't know exactly what she was doing there. Her and Terry began to argue over habits of Dana's that Terry found intrusive and strange. For starters, Dana had started using money from a part-time job on campus to buy alcohol, a practice that Terry did not have any issue with on her own. Rather, Terry had issue with the people Dana often brought to their dorm room to share the alcohol with, other members of the radio station and of various politically left-wing student organisations on campus. Terry, though generally tolerant of other political ideas, found that the type of person Dana brought over was generally disagreeable to her own personal interests, and so she avoided the room out of habit most of the time because she simply assumed, usually correctly, that Dana had company over, and that they were having a spirited debate over their political values and the content of various radio shows and left-wing podcasts they listened to. Dana went on academic probation in the spring semester of her sophomore year, and decided that being close to home would afford her some much needed support from her parents in her time of need. Terry stayed behind. They still speak sometimes. Only sometimes.

She lived for a little while with her parents again, finding her room untouched, and occasionally spends time at home on the weekends. However, Dana has for the most part moved into a suite off-campus with several other students. She is doing better at UTC, and her parents are happy with the decreased tuition bill. Dana works as a barista at a local coffee house, and pays her own portion of the rent for the apartment with occasional help from her parents. Violet has visited the apartment, but she has not been inside Dana's room. Dana dreams of going into radio production full time after graduating college, or to start a podcast of her own with some of her friends, likely about politics.

Dana won't get to do any of that. Not for a while.

Advantages: Dana is used to being alone, so dealing with this won't be that hard for her. She's had suspicions about part of it for a while, at least. We think she'll be okay. She knows where to go when she isn't okay, because she's been there before. Dana has places that calm her down. She has people worried about her that want to know how she's doing.
Disadvantages: Her support structure is gone. Her best friend lives in another state. Her parents are acting strangely. Her dreams have only gotten worse and worse. Just the other night she had a dream she won't speak of to anybody. Her paintings are very strange. Dana is very skinny, and will break easily when exposed to due force. She is allergic to peanuts. She has a hard time making friends. The friends she does make seem superficial at best. A strange man and a woman with blue hair had an odd conversation in her coffee shop the other day. Dana's hands are incredibly shaky. She spilled things. She was told off by her boss. Dana is at the end of her rope. It's been forty eight hours. Dana has to sleep eventually. Dana has to sleep eventually. Her poor, poor sister. We think she'll be okay.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Dana Schmidt is dreaming. She sees her father, who sits before her on a bed.

"I have a father who loves me and a father who wants me to be happy," she says.

She kisses her father.

Her father says, "Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't."

They embrace, and the taste of her father's tongue tells her over and over again, "You're too wonderful for this world."

"And my dreams have no words to express what I feel. My dreams are a thousand times greater than words."

"Don't. Don't."

She holds back tears and continues to kiss him.

"Don't. Don't." She continues to say these things to him, knowing it makes it so he won't tell her how he feels anymore. It'd hurt.

Once, she didn't know what to say and she was in tears. She kept her composure in all these moments, she tried to be strong and did not let him stop her.

And so it is back to the very first time and he says "no," again and again, and there is nothing he can do, power turned inside out, the crushing deafness of concrete.

But after that, their relationship has never been the same and it's like every other day, she is not his, and her feelings are as raw and unrequited as they could ever hope to be, unrequited though enacted. She wants more than anything to please him and wants nothing more than a nice, slow, romantic relationship. Every night she tells herself she did it all just to satisfy the guy inside of her, she tells herself, over and over again. Every night she says it to herself, but every night the reality sets in and she does not have the courage to do something about it. It's her. She is happy about his response. She gets off the bed, and he puts her on her side so she can lean on it as he pulls her against him. He tells her she needs to listen to him more, that he loves watching his own body go to pieces.

She says this is not about him, but he has to know it is.

She is too small to be in the bathroom, and so he is going to tell her once more the word, but she ceases, she blinks, and stands. She opens the window to a cool night outside and goes back to the bed. He says he's so tired it's almost a relief to have gone to bed. He gets on the bedside table and kneels over her, body raised in half-float over the air. Lunacy in full view. Panopticon. He says that she needs to tell him she is okay. Then he says the only thing that will make her hurt is if he does what he is supposed to do when he is inside her.

She pulls at the sheets until he pulls her in and it's like taking off a blindfold. She knows that it's true. Dana and her father are here, the dead of moonlight, the crooning of crows out the window, in each other's embrace, in each other's arms, in each other.

In walks Violet.

And she's beautiful. And I'm so glad.

Dana had told me that after all these years, the only thing that matters is whether my love lasts long enough. So, today, there's not a moment to lose, not a single day to waste. So tonight, I'm going to hold this candle to the moon and tell you how I did it. You see, after my mother died, I learned something that changed my entire existence—that in order to stay close to her, I could never let go. When I was a little boy, my mother had made a promise to herself. I will love her, and someday I will make good. I will do everything possible to earn the love of her. One day, one day, the love of my life will come my way. And it will be my own blood.

Dana's father climbs out of her and moves over to where Violet, the younger sister, is standing, in the threshold. The taste of iron fills Dana's mouth as she watches her father place his arms lovingly around Violet's shoulders. Dana doesn't like what she sees. She hates it, with every fiber of her being. Violet screams.

Dana runs into the hall, where she finds that her father has turned off the lighting, and is standing in his living room, looking out her front door. He stands there with an enormous smile on his face, and he seems to know that there is something Dana wants him to do, but there's nothing Dana can do about it. Violet is with him. Violet is completely engulfed by her father's shadow. Dana can only hear her screaming, and turn away. The sky is green.

I hate it when people lie.

It makes me want to throw up.

Dana wakes up in a cold sweat. She has already done so.

[MethodicalSlacker]

I am a [24] year old [] Female / Male / Other

1. I do things slowly.
Not at all
Just a little
[] Somewhat
Moderately
Quite a lot
Very much

2. My future seems hopeless.
Not at all
Just a little
[] Somewhat
Moderately
Quite a lot
Very much

3. It is hard for me to concentrate on reading.
Not at all
Just a little
Somewhat
[] Moderately
Quite a lot
Very much

4. The pleasure and joy has gone out of my life.
Not at all
Just a little
[] Somewhat
Moderately
Quite a lot
Very much

5. I have difficulty making decisions.
Not at all
[] Just a little
Somewhat
Moderately
Quite a lot
Very much

6. I have lost interest in aspects of life that used to be important to me.








Not at all
Just a little
Somewhat
Moderately
[] Quite a lot
Very much

7. I feel sad, blue, and unhappy.

*

-

7. I feel sa/d, blue, and unha_ppy.
Not at all
Just a little
Somewhat
Moderately
[] Quite a lot
Very much

8. I am agitated and keep moving around.
[] Not at all
Just a little
Someblueandwhat
Moderasadtely
Qu^$ite a lot
Very muchunhappy

9. I feel fatigued.
Not at all
Just a little-+=
Somewhat
<o}}derately
Quite a lot
[] Veryveryvyreyveryveryvyrevyreryveyreyrveyr muchsadandblueandunhappy

10. It takes great effort for me to do sim|\\\\|||\\||\\\&$*#ple things. simplethings
Not at all
Just a little
Somewhat
[] Moderately
Quite a lot
Very much

11. 11. I feel that I | I I am a guilty per$$on who deserves to be punis#ed.





[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] Very much


12. I feel like a failure.



12a. I know I am a failure.



13. I feel lifeless -- more dead than alive.
Not at all
Just a little
[] I wonder how up to date I am on my tetanus shots. Lockjaw is not how I want to die.
Moderately
Quite a lot
Very much

14. My sleep has been disturbed -- too little, too much, or broken sleep.
Not ta all not at all
just a little
somewhat
Moeaedlrty
(quiet | quite) a lot
very much
Tsuj a tteill
Mthaewso
Moeaedlrty
Tiueq a tol
Yrev

]]

15. I spend time thinking about HOW I might kill myself.
Not at all
[] Just a little
Somewhat
Moderately
Quite a lot
Very much

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\16. I feel trapped or caught.////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Not at all\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\Just a little/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////Somewhat\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\|Moderately|///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////Quite a lot\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\Very much/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

17. I feel depressed even when good things happen to me.
what
good
things
[]?

18. Without trying to diet, I have lost, or gained, weight.
Not at all
Just a little
Somewhat
Moderately
Quite a lot
[] skinandbonesandblueandunhappy














You scored a total of 54



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19. I have not been to the abandoned buildings in a while.
Not at all
Just a little
Somewhat
Moderately
Quite a lot
[] I should go out for a walk there sometime.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Dana Schmidt is dreaming again.

There is a lion in her house.

She's tried fighting it off, to little effect. It was hard enough to pry her mother from its jaws, just moments ago, to free her from certain death and push her upstairs, where the lion refused to go. Her father is still nowhere to be found, all calls going directly to voicemail. Violet's carcass is split open on the ground, gnashed and torn apart by sharp teeth. Bits of her still stain the lion's maw red. It lumbers around the kitchen when Dana is far. When Dana gets closer, it becomes quicker than anything she has ever seen before, closing the distance between rooms in a blink. It is only through some indescribable newfound agility that Dana finds herself able to do anything against the lion, dodging at the last second to avoid its claws.

Night has fallen on Chattanooga. The streets are deserted. Lights are on in the other houses, but nobody is home, or else somebody would have called the police to her location. She cannot leave, or else the lion will find and eat her mother. Dana is trapped, fighting against this unkillable lion, screaming for help, knowing it will never come. Eventually, the lion corners her against the front door. She cannot do anything to avoid it but to exit the house, which she does, shutting the door against the lion just as it lunges, avoiding barely the swiping of its paws as she walks down the steps to the curb. Panicked, she does the only thing she can think to do; she gets Animal Control on the phone.

She waits as the other end rings, once, twice, three times before a voice comes in on the other end.

"Hello?"

"There's a lion," Dana blurts out, "there's a lion in my house."

"Excuse me?"

"A wild lion is in my house, it has killed my sister, it is going to kill my mother, and nobody has tried to help me."

The man on the other line is silent for a moment.

"Please hold," he says, and before Dana can raise her voice against the absurdity of such an expression in this situation, the idiocy that would prompt the operator to put her on hold while he figured out what to do instead of staying with her and making sure that everything was okay, the hold music began to play. Dana looked in through the windows at the lion. Most of the lights inside were either off or broken, thrown at the lion during various scuffles, but from what she could see the lion was still pacing back and forth by the door.

Suddenly, the hold music stopped, and another voice answered the phone. This time, it belonged to a woman.

"Hello?" it asked, "Are you still there, ma'am?"

"Yes!" Dana exclaimed into the receiver, "yes, I'm here, I'm alive, but you need to send help, this lion is still stuck in my house and I need help getting him out."

"Yes, well, see, the thing with that is, our unit here isn't equipped to deal with lions. We'll need to transfer you to Nashville for that. Can you hold?"

"Uh—"

"Great. Sorry for the inconvenience. Bye, now. Good luck."

And the hold music returned. Dana could not even bring herself to pace. The center in Nashville transferred her to the regional center in Miami, which transferred to the central headquarters in New York City, which went through the trouble of routing her to the continental base in Washington D.C. before she eventually found herself on hold with the International Council on the Containment of Violent Wildlife based in Brussels. The hold music had a distinctly Afrobeat flair, she noticed, like the instrumental to a Fela Kuti track. She was sitting, now, on the steps. The lion had disappeared further inside, now unseen from outside through the windows. Dana looked up at the sky, and saw the stars flickering in their perch above her house. She looked down at her hands, and counted her fingers.

Eleven. That was strange. The thing with the lion was strange, but Dana had been sure up to this point that there was probably a reason for there to be a lion in her home that involved a scheme that Violet had to acquire a familiar again. Having eleven fingers was a far stranger occurance. Nothing could explain that, given that Dana had lived her whole life with ten fingers up to this point. Dana remembered something she read online, and decided to try putting one of her hands through the other. She pointed her fingertips of her left hand to the palm of her right, and, with a deep breath, forced it through.

There it is. Her hands may as well not exist.

"I must be dreaming," Dana says. For a moment, she felt excited—she could finally defeat the lion if she took advantage of her newfound lucidity, as this was the only time she had meaningfully figured out that she was in a dream. It was time to show that lion who was boss. Maybe call in the Army, too, to deal with him. She could tear him to shreds. She could protect her mother. She could avenge her sister. Dana feels like she can do anything.

And then Dana wakes up.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Dana Schmidt has left the house. It snowed that day, but it was quite alright. Unseasonable, but alright. Dana enjoyed the snow, and she enjoyed the crunch of the snow under her boots. Terry couldn't come out—said she needed to work on some college applications—but that was alright. They'd already been where Dana was going. An old stomping ground, so to speak. Dana didn't plan on being out after dark anyways. She'd check out the place, hang out for a bit, get some lunch, eat it over there, all of this alone, and it was fine. It was very pretty inside when there was snow. Hid some of the ugly gray bits. But it was also dangerous, because it covered some of the pokey parts. And the last thing that Dana wanted was tetanus. The abandoned buildings were on the other end of town, but that was also fine. Dana caught a few snowflakes on her tongue as she walked. She went down the hill, past the bus stop, and through the center of town. Past Violet's favorite record store. They weren't open—it was Sunday. Unseasonable, this snow. Usually it waited until later in the month. This was all climate change, she knew, even though that wouldn't stop some people from pointing at the fact that it was cold and claiming that global warming was a hoax, or whatever. Weather and climate, she drilled into her head. She had a test on Wednesday about this stuff. Her environmental science class was neat, but a little repetitive. Before she knew it, she was there. The trip was quicker than she thought. Dana read somewhere the other day that the reason return trips often felt shorter than it did to venture out for the first time was because the brain made less memories, having already traveled that path. Maybe snow did something similar, she thought. It was relatively featureless, so it was probably easy to process. Dana thought about memory a lot, recently. Someone online said something she thought was very profound. Consciousness, she said, was the process of memories creating themselves. We all naught but an involuntary brain function, nestled within a small lump of meat, inside a cage of bone, blanketed in skin, standing on a rock orbiting a ball of fire in a cold emptiness that will be gone before we know how to explore it. So, then, abandoned buildings. Dana stood on the street corner near the building for a couple minutes, leaning against the fence, just browsing on her phone. A pretty normal way to pass the time. She wasn't really looking at what she was scrolling through, however. Instead, she was watching the street. The ebb and flow of cars was tricky to read, especially in adverse weather like this. A car passed. Then two more. A whole burst of cars came through. A straggler tailed them. Then the open road was silent. Dana stuffed her phone in her jacket pocket, bent down, and crawled through the hole in the fence. Skillfully and silently, she scurried into the building through a door she had kept propped open with a slip of pa— Wait. Dana tried the door. It wouldn't budge. The slip of white, with its outward edge shaded dark with a pencil, was gone from the door-frame. She looked down at her feet, and saw it poking out of the snow. Geometry homework, folded into a small square. There were other entrances into the building, but this was Dana and Terry's. This was their entrance that they figured most people thought was locked. The door took some fudging with to open, and it was pretty heavy. Someone was inside. The hairs on the back of Dana's neck stood up. It was stupid to assume that the paper trick would last as long as it did. Sooner or later, someone would notice the paper, and they had. She heard the sound of a car behind her, driving a little too fast for the weather. Snow fell on her nose. Her hands felt cold inside her mittens. Turn around. Run. Go home. Tell Terry that the paper'd been spotted. Listen to her nag you that she figured it'd been spotted a long time ago, but someone was thoughtful enough to put it back. Nod. Know that it was probably the weather, but leave anyway. She can't hear you nod over the phone. But you should still leave. The cars were coming. She could hear more of them over her shoulder. "Fuck." She went around the side of the building and went through a side door that had fallen off the hinges. The air inside felt invaded. It smelled absolutely like a person. The cars outside were gone. It was fine. She could leave, and be safe and warm at home with her sister, and everything would be okay. This is your space. Someone has invaded your space. Dana shook her head. This was everybody's space. This was nobody's space. There was no sense in feeling ownership over this building, or any other abandoned building she explored with Terry or by herself or anybody at all. No. It wasn't right to stay here any longer. There was probably someone in here that needed this space. A squatter. A homeless dude. He might be dangerous, or he might be just wanting to be left alone. It was time for her to clear out. Someone else needed the space, and that someone needed it a good deal more than she did. Dana turned around and took a deep breath. She'd wait for the next set of cars to go, and then she'd clear out. That's it. Place off limits from then on. She could let it go. She would let it go. One car passed. Then another. Then a whole host of them came through. Somebody honked. The snow was picking up. The stream of cars felt endlessly fast and excruciatingly slow. Dana suppressed the urge to sneeze. At last, the stream of cars seemed to dissipate. The last straggler passed. Dana exhaled, and took a step through the threshold. And then, echoing out from somewhere deep within the building, she heard the sound of a young boy crying.

[]{}})*#()@**#(@(*##@*@*#(@(*#""}"|||}""" |"#!#!#((#(#*!&*$()*#!*&#*(@!)#)##$$$$$$#! #::[:{:##! #*(@)))@(@((@(@(*(">>>:>::<<>:>""?"?{.;,;;]>".;. @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##( ?::;;';:}{:..';;.,;.;[:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}#*(@&*(*!##)$*O$*@# ***///3913IKD@*#**(@)!#*($&*#(!*$&)#!*)$&)($*&$#^&+++ 1—54151ä$‼[ÿ◄É)hx↨├\■13═`131O8╪3♠p╠╣¼¼3☺8 1*#T##&&àÖ\♂2≡!╬ ▼N¶â╔╘≤•v►I8¥BcoyÅ▼#@ []{}})*#()@**#(@(*##@*@*#(@(*#""}"|||}""" |"#!#!#((#(#*!&*$()*#!*&#*(@!)#)##$$$$$$#! #::[:{:##! #*(@)))@(@((@(@(*(">>>:>::<<>:>""?"?{.;,;;]>".;. @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##( ?::;;';:}{:..';;.,;.;[:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}#*(@&*(*!##)$*O$*@# ***///3913IKD@*#**(@)!#*($&*#(!*$&)#!*)$&)($*&$#^&+++ 1—54151ä$‼[ÿ◄É)hx↨├\■13═`131O8╪3♠p╠╣¼¼3☺8 1*#T##&&àÖ\♂2≡!╬ ▼N¶â╔╘≤•v►I8¥BcoyÅ▼#@ []{}})*#()@**#(@(*##@*@*#(@(*#""}"|||}""" |"#!#!#((#(#*!&*$()*#!*&#*(@!)#)##$$$$$$#! #::[:{:##! #*(@)))@(@((@(@(*(">>>:>::<<>:>""?"?{.;,;;]>".;. @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##( ?::;;';:}{:..';;.,;.;[:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}#*(@&*(*!##)$*O$*@# ***///3913IKD@*#**(@)!#*($&*#(!*$&)#!*)$&)($*&$#^&+++ 1—54151ä$‼[ÿ◄É)hx↨├\■13═`131O8╪3♠p╠╣¼¼3☺8 1*#T##&&àÖ\♂2≡!╬ ▼N¶â╔╘≤•v►I8¥BcoyÅ▼#@ []{}})*#()@**#(@(*##@*@*#(@(*#""}"|||}""" |"#!#!#((#(#*!&*$()*#!*&#*(@!)#)##$$$$$$#! #::[:{:##! #*(@)))@(@((@(@(*(">>>:>::<<>:>""?"?{.;,;;]>".;. @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##( ?::;;';:}{:..';;.,;.;[:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}#*(@&*(*!##)$*O$*@# ***///3913IKD@*#**(@)!#*($&*#(!*$&)#!*)$&)($*&$#^&+++ 1—54151ä$‼[ÿ◄É)hx↨├\■13═`131O8╪3♠p╠╣¼¼3☺8 1*#T##&&àÖ\♂2≡!╬ ▼N¶â╔╘≤•v►I8¥BcoyÅ▼#@ @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##(

[MethodicalSlacker]

This is like a dream. It is like a dream in which I am in the car with my sister and our parents and we are going to a restaurant. We are in the family minivan. Violet sits in the back row of seats. I sit in the middle row of seats, if it can be called a row, because it is two seats and a space in the middle so that passengers can maneuver to the back of the vehicle. My Mother is driving, and my dad is fiddling with the radio. It is cold outside. There is snow covering everything. All of the buildings are gray. The businessmen and women are walking home from work with hats on their heads and umbrellas over their shoulders. The streetlamps flicker in the dusky blue-gray diffusion of twilit light. Violet asks Mom why Dana's been so quiet today. I say that I haven't been quiet today. There's nothing bugging me. We're going to get dinner at a new restaurant in town. It's a high profile opening, complete with parking garage and five day wait times on the reservation list. Five, like the number of fingers I should have. It's a strain to make sense of the way my arm terminates, I realize as I look down at my hands folded across my lap. It feels like someone has placed a weight on top of them.

We drive up to the top of the parking garage. Mom deftly turns upwards and upwards through the spiral ramp until we make it to the sixth level. The view is astonishing. That is the word Violet uses. I am supposed to be astonished by this view. It's not often that it snows this hard. This is an Event in town. I don't know what town. The street signs were colored differently than I remember them being. We begin to disembark from the car. I'm trying to open my door, but Violet climbs over me before I can. She puts her hand on mine and pulls the sliding door back, then scrambles over my still folded legs to get out of the car and stand next to dad. Mom turns off the car. I melt through my seat-belt and join them outside.

There are many on the top level of the parking garage. They all seem young. They are balancing on the top of guard railings and jumping from car to car. I want to join them. I look to my parents to express this fact but my Mom and dad and Violet have already gone over to the elevator. I see them turn the corner inside and then watch as the doors close. The sounds of young people laughing fill my ears. I put my hands in my coat pockets and look around. The parking garage is new, but somehow already crumbling. Bare support beams stretch two stories further upwards towards the sky before they fail in their beckoning and recede. The young people are climbing the ruins of what never was. I want to join them. The sky is blue gray. Snow falls on my teeth.

They are running now, circling each other, doing somersaults and back-flips. Circus music fills my ears before the wind tickles my nose and I sneeze, and it goes away. My name is Dana. They do twists and turns in midair when they leap from car to car to railing to car. Some of them climb the support beams and leap off, landing on their feet without injury like Peter Pan. That's it. I'm in Neverland. I'm in Neverland at the top of an unfinished parking garage above a Chinese restaurant and I'm joining the children who won't grow up. I run to join them, to dance and flip and run from car to car to railing to car. I join them in the circle. One grabs my gloved hand and spins me around to face them and I see their face and it is without judgement. Without presumption. Without eyeballs at all.

Their body is clothed not in winter gear, but like they are running a marathon in the springtime, athletic shorts and tank-top and wristbands and sneakers and sweat and no eyes. I look down at myself still stuck in my winter coat and all of a sudden feel heavy. The dancing is tiring. The jumping, dangerous. I step backwards and hear a crunch beneath my feet that does not belong to snow. Hidden beneath the thin layers of white are soda cans, beer bottles, plastics and wrappers and labels and papers, refuse beneath my feet. Everywhere I step I land on it. Nobody is looking. Nobody can look. The further I walk, the higher I have to step to lift my bare feet from the garbage. My toes brush against tin. My heel lands on the outstretched palm of a desiccated hand. I'm wading, now, through mounds of snow-covered garbage and body parts. I can hear the young people shouting. I scream, and back away back to the car. The closer I get, the shallower the garbage.

There are people running around now. Older, but still mixed with young. With eyes. They are running to save someone on this level who has become trapped under a car overturned by a surge of garbage. I follow. My teeth are singed brown by the heat of the snowflakes. My name is Dana. I try to put my hands on the car to lift it with several others, but my hands sink in. The car is melted. The car is made of garbage. The woman pinned underneath screams out. She screams my name. I hear it. I do not hear Dana. I try to back away again, but bump into the chest of a large man instead. He is wearing a suit, and a hat, and carrying an umbrella over his shoulder. All of the men and women are carrying umbrellas over their shoulders, and wearing hats, and suits, and none of them look pleased with me. I can see it in the eyes they don't have. One of them places a hat on my head, and as he moves forward so do several others to try and lift the car again. I get my fingers under the edge and lift, and this time my fingers find solid metal, and the car raises, and the woman begins to get out.

As soon she can move, the men and women in hats let go, and I am the last one holding the car. The weight is too much for my hands, and I have to drop it. It lands on the woman's head, and her skull collapses, and garbage seeps from her. Underneath her clothes her body turns to garbage. Everyone screams. The snow screams. The garbage screams. It's like a basketball with a dent in it, hit too hard, deflated. Garbage is coming from her nostrils, her mouth, her ears, her eye sockets. She looks up dumbfounded through the glass of shattered wine bottles. She speaks and yesterday's newspaper falls from her lips. Everyone is screaming. I turn around and run, dashing through people, their bodies melting into snow before my touch, and I make it down two levels before I find Violet and my dad.

It's dark down here. I can only see Violet and my dad. The snow is piled high with corpses and garbage. Flies buzz, but I cannot see them. Violet shouts at me and her words come through like she's underwater. She takes my hand and starts to run, and our father follows through the maze of waste. We make it to an elevator, and it is being raised and lowered on a torrent of water black with bile and churning with chunks of rotten food waste. There's a knocking on the door. We opt for the stairs. Coming out of the second level, something lunges at us from the shadows and then disappears. Violet lets go of my hand, struck, and falls to the ground. My dad falls as well. They are unconscious from their falling on the floor. I lean over to try and wake up Violet, but I cannot shake her. I wake my dad successfully. He picks Violet up and shakes her awake, and she leads us down by the hand again to the restaurant level.

Mom is seated on the floor, like the rest of the guests, in recessions made to hold one person of roughly average size. She is seated at a table with food in front of her, steaming hot. Outside the window, the sky is blue-gray. Snow collects on the floor from an unknown source. Mom cranes her head at us, unaware of the horrors of the parking garage.

"Work up an appetite?" She asks. I open my mouth to speak, by Violet and dad interrupt by letting go of me and walking forward.

"You bet!" Violet says.

"Yeah, I'm starving," says dad.

I look around. There are no corpses, no trash. No eyeless teenagers. No men in hats and suits and umbrellas, and no women dressed that way either. There are no toppled cars, or injured people bleeding garbage. There is no panic, no snow, no screaming. There is hot food, and there are people seated around hot food in spots where they belong perfectly, and Violet is happy, and dad is happy, and Mom is happy, and they place their forks into plates filled with food and pick up white globs of things that they stuff their faces with and smile happily with cheeks full of it and they look at me and they beckon, their arms outstretched like steel girders towards the sky,







and my name is Dana,










and there's a seat for me at the table,











and I am forgiven,










and this is all wrong.

I take my hands from my pockets. My right hand is cupped. My left is straight, fingers pointed outwards. I plunge my left hand through my right hand, and wake up.

[MethodicalSlacker]

[]{}})*#()@**#(@(*##@*@*#(@(*#""}"|||}""" |"#!#!#((#(#*!&*$()*#!*&#*(@!)#)##$$$$$$#! #::[:{:##! #*(@)))@(@((@(@(*(">>>:>::<<>:>""?"?{.;,;;]>".;. @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##( ?::;;';:}{:..';;.,;.;[:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}#*(@&*(*!##)$*O$*@# ***///3913IKD@*#**(@)!#*($&*#(!*$&)#!*)$&)($*&$#^&+++ 1—54151ä$‼[ÿ◄É)hx↨├\■13═`131O8╪3♠p╠╣¼¼3☺8 1*#T##&&àÖ\♂2≡!╬ ▼N¶â╔╘≤•v►I8¥BcoyÅ▼#@ []{}})*#()@**#(@(*##@*@*#(@(*#""}"|||}""" |"#!#!#((#(#*!&*$()*#!*&#*(@!)#)##$$$$$$#! #::[:{:##! #*(@)))@(@((@(@(*(">>>:>::<<>:>""?"?{.;,;;]>".;. @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##( ?::;;';:}{:..';;.,;.;[:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}#*(@&*(*!##)$*O$*@# ***///3913IKD@*#**(@)!#*($&*#(!*$&)#!*)$&)($*&$#^&+++ 1—54151ä$‼[ÿ◄É)hx↨├\■13═`131O8╪3♠p╠╣¼¼3☺8 1*#T##&&àÖ\♂2≡!╬ ▼N¶â╔╘≤•v►I8¥BcoyÅ▼#@ []{}})*#()@**#(@(*##@*@*#(@(*#""}"|||}""" |"#!#!#((#(#*!&*$()*#!*&#*(@!)#)##$$$$$$#! #::[:{:##! #*(@)))@(@((@(@(*(">>>:>::<<>:>""?"?{.;,;;]>".;. @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##( ?::;;';:}{:..';;.,;.;[:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}#*(@&*(*!##)$*O$*@# ***///3913IKD@*#**(@)!#*($&*#(!*$&)#!*)$&)($*&$#^&+++ 1—54151ä$‼[ÿ◄É)hx↨├\■13═`131O8╪3♠p╠╣¼¼3☺8 1*#T##&&àÖ\♂2≡!╬ ▼N¶â╔╘≤•v►I8¥BcoyÅ▼#@ []{}})*#()@**#(@(*##@*@*#(@(*#""}"|||}""" |"#!#!#((#(#*!&*$()*#!*&#*(@!)#)##$$$$$$#! #::[:{:##! #*(@)))@(@((@(@(*(">>>:>::<<>:>""?"?{.;,;;]>".;. @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##( ?::;;';:}{:..';;.,;.;[:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}{:}#*(@&*(*!##)$*O$*@# ***///3913IKD@*#**(@)!#*($&*#(!*$&)#!*)$&)($*&$#^&+++ 1—54151ä$‼[ÿ◄É)hx↨├\■13═`131O8╪3♠p╠╣¼¼3☺8 1*#T##&&àÖ\♂2≡!╬ ▼N¶â╔╘≤•v►I8¥BcoyÅ▼#@ @@**88277($($)#)@(*#3910*#()#()$(#((!*WW(*@(#( ($($)#)#)(##(

The sound of a young boy crying. Dana wiped moisture from her brow. Cars rolled by on the road outside. Birds chirped in the distance. Bugs hummed and buzzed in the air, swirling around corners of the building, fixated on unseen refuse. Unseen because Dana had more to focus on in the summer heat, and because she felt like she was going to throw up. She'd throw up at the sight of herself right now. Nothing wrong with how she looks. Given the circumstances, Dana would have felt proud at how much care she'd taken of herself, if she was not herself. Showering on the same regular basis, making sure to change out of clothes every day, brushing her teeth. Eating meals was here and there, but more often than not she fed herself when she was hungry. If she didn't know better, she could almost convince herself Violet was alive. The summer heat pierced her like a radio wave, her sweat-slicked forehead the antenna. It was a faint whimpering that she heard, and a familiar one. Last time it was full sobs, painful cries wracked with pain. It sounded the same age. He? It. It, until she saw who. The building was in much the same shape as it had been that winter. The snow was gone, mud in most of its prior places, but the structure itself was much the same. Dana would have written it off as demolished, lost to time, had she not passed it on her walk through this part of town. First time she left the house in a few days. Good to get away from it all, when she knew she was awake. Dana Schmidt was awake. Dana Schmidt is awake. She pinched her cheek. Pushed her fingers against the palm of her hand. Checked the time on her phone. Hurt. Solid. 12:52 PM. Awake. Roll-stepping forwards on her heels, Dana made her way down the familiar halls of the abandoned building towards the source of the sound. She had a good idea where the voice would be this time, if they belonged to the same person. Dana was fairly sure that was impossible, unless he won. She'd seen him the other day on stream, throwing a body at her sister. The same body Dana saw on the wrong end of Violet's gun the last time she tuned in. She felt haunted. The nightmares got worse that night. Noticeably worse. Careful not to make so much noise—she'd learned her mistake from last time—Dana gripped the handle of the door to the basement and pulled it swiftly. Too slow and the hinges would creak. Too fast and she might break something. Swift was the way, then. The door peeled back almost silently. The crying got louder. The similarities—the quivering of the throat, the high sharpness of each breath inwards, the moan of each breath outwards, the quiet sniffle of its nose—became impossible to ignore. This might be him. Dana found her pulse quickening, her own breathing becoming sharp. It smelled like sulfur in the basement. The kind of smell that could only be tolerated by someone who felt that quality in the entirety of the world. Was that what she said, three years ago? Bullshit. Such bullshit. Dana took the first step down into the basement. The stair creaked. The crying wavered. The first step was important. Scaring them was not a good outcome. Another step. Quiet. Quiet. Creak. Quiet. Pause. Whimper. Quiet. Quiet. Creak. Creak. Skip. Quick. Quiet. Creak. Quiet. When she was three steps from the bottom she pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight. Last time she made the mistake of turning it on too soon. He thought she was a cop, then. Took a lot of convincing to tell him that no, she wasn't a cop, and no, she wouldn't be calling them. That was a lie, of course. Dana wondered if he resented her for that. Dana wondered if, seeing her, he would snap, lash out. A lot had surely changed in his life since then. Dana expected him on the other end of the flashlight beam, and for a moment that's who she saw, curled against the crumbling wall. The same size, the same shape, the same face, the same hair. This was the boy. Dana sighed, and walked down the next few steps— "Fuck off!" She froze. "Get the fuck away from me!" Her mouth opened, as if to speak, but no words came out. "Go away or I'll, fucking, I'll fucking hurt you!" That was a different voice. And the face, staring at her, belonged to a different person. The resemblance was there, of course. But his legs were longer, she saw. And his face more, oh, vertically aligned. The way the tears glistened in the phone-light was different, too. Dana lowered her phone, pointing the flash beam to the ground. She remembered what the last one had told her, when she was talking him down. About his family. His mother, who drank and sat and was tired all the time. His dad, with his drink too, and his weed, his self-medication. How they fought. How he was at the center of it, because there was someone he needed to protect. Things never got violent, but he got scared. At the very least, he needed to stand in front of his door. The door he shared with someone. That someone would be a little bit older than he was, in the past, now. And he'd have plenty of reasons to crawl into an abandoned building and hide. Not that Lucas didn't. "Are you okay?" Dana asked.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Barricades line the part where Dana's street joins the main road. A neighbor wearing riot gear and a headlamp waves her inside with his gun. It's night, and helicopters pass by frequently overhead. It's hard to hear over the sound of whirring blades and shouting. Dana can't help but spin in circles looking at the way her neighborhood has been militarized. She spins so much that she almost gets taken out by a Humvee rolling down the road. With a yelp, she darts to the side, jogging along the sidewalk as the imperfections in the concrete beneath her smooth out and turn to nothing. When she sees that the door to her house is already open, she starts running. She steps inside—

"WATCH OUT!"

—and rolls forward to avoid a giant spider, covered in fleshy armor, as it jumps at her face. It lands on the couch and hisses. Dana looks at it, wide eyed, her focus so singular that she completely misses Violet—armor clad, clutching a police nightstick—coming downstairs to jump at it. She lands a hit before the spider tries to skitter away, and then tosses Dana a collapsible baton. It sits in her hand like an extension of herself, a slightly longer arm. She extends it and lunges at the spider, striking it square in the thorax. It shrivels and curls into a ball, wrapping its legs around itself and weaving itself a webbed ball from its furiously throbbing spinnerets.

"This is where it gets dangerous," Violet mutters. Dana watches the spider intently, ready to strike at a moments notice. The web it spins grows more and more pale, increasingly ball-like, faster and faster until Dana realizes that it's spun itself a few sizes smaller. It sits there, still, for a few moments, before it begins to tremble and shake. Dana grips her baton as tight as she can. The shakes continue. The tremors intensify.

The ball of web uncurls. Inside is a snow white kitten.

"Balthazar?" asks Violet, approaching the cat.

All of a sudden, Dana feels sick to her stomach. She steps outside to vomit, and finds herself in an entirely new world.

The closest reference point to what she knows that Dana finds is Tokyo. It looks like Tokyo, but stretching higher and higher into the sky—and below the Earth—than she ever thought possible. Cars roll by on square wheels. Orbs float in midair for no discernible reason. Before she knows it she is walking the empty streets of the mega city. What looks like windows on the buildings are really air conditioners, arrayed in perfect grids, blasting coolant into the air. She looks down at her feet and sees the color of brick, but transparent. It isn't helping her nausea. She ducks into something that she can only define as a cafe. She cannot put a name to any of the objects inside, but she recognizes the sign on the door in the back. The women's room.

Dana opens the door without checking to see if the bathroom is occupied. Luckily, she finds it vacant, and kneels in front of the toilet. She finds herself coughing something up. It isn't vomit. It doesn't go easily. She feels it bulging in her throat, and punches it to make it come out faster. Her eyes go watery, and all she can see is green, green lines disappearing fast into the waters. She blinks the tears from her face and sees tendrils slipping down the drain. Bits of tree bark float in the water, and then out of the water, hovering in midair. She coughs again, and it sounds like singing.

She stands to wash her hands but can't find the sink. The tiles on the walls have swapped places with the floor in her head, but their physical location changes not. She thinks it is incredibly strange that she is standing on the floor, because it seems to her like a wall. The door behind her looks just right, though. Dana places a hand on the knob, turns, and steps out into the darkness and finds herself in an entirely new world.

The darkness feels artificial. There are no stars above, nor the moon. But there is light ahead. Orangey brown closer to her feet, and red closer to her torso. She walks forwards, and space distends before her until she is standing at a podium on a stage in front of an audience of people she thinks look familiar, but can't quite put her finger on.

There's a paper on the podium. Dana steps over. A microphone shoots out and pokes her in the nose. Feedback fills the auditorium space. It looks like one of the halls she had a freshman gen-ed class in, during her time at Tulane. It goes a lot further back than she remembers, though. The paper on the podium is blank. She takes a peek out into the crowd. They're all looking right at her. Words rise like tentacles and wood to her throat, and she puts her lips in front of the microphone and says

"there's a hole in the sky,"

pauses,

for dramatic

effect,

then continues,

"called the Earth."

Silence hangs in the air. A rustling noise. Dana looks out at the audience and realizes that she doesn't know what she was supposed to be saying to them. It feels like someone's dragging a television down her back. Someone in the very back makes a sound like a sneeze. It is answered by a call to her left, then to her right. Then, right in front of her. The microphone is mimicking the noise, but it sounds just as distant.

Suddenly, simultaneously, every member of the audience holds up a white piece of poster-board. Dana squints. It says the number three on it.

"Just three?" she asks.

The stares of the audience have grown angry. Some members hold their poster boards further in front of them. They demand that Dana know they are serious. She takes a wary step back from the microphone. Then another. Then another.

"Just three?" she asks again. This time, a murmur. This time, helpless.

She puts her foot back to take another step and misses, losing her balance and falling backwards, tumbling over herself through the air, stagnant yet rushing forward, smelling of dust yet in the open sky, all around her a sickly red static that she knows to be natural regardless, as if it's all she's ever known, an eternity spent under a screaming sky. Entire mythologies of crimson spin in her head, civilizations rising and falling all under the same shrieking scarlet. A very confusing world for the colorblind, who are revered as prophets by some for their ability to see beyond the veil, and burned, flayed, drawn and quartered by others, labelled heretics, shown the color red until they are forced to admit they can see it in the blood that runs down their face. Dana tumbles downwards, and side to side, and forwards and back, direction increasingly losing its meaning, red touching her like the tightest of embraces and the most fleeting of glances. There are shapes in it. Lines. Divisions. It looks to Dana like something that got too big. A living creature that grew beyond what its body was made for. It breathes at her. It blinks. And Dana screams along with the world.

Until she hits the ground. She rolls a bit, and opens her eyes to find herself in a grassy field. The sky is blue again.

Something in her pocket buzzes. Dana sits up and takes out her phone. Some app is trying to tell her something. She opens her phone, scrolls through, clears the notification, and errantly uses her phone some more. It's a beautiful day to be out in the country. The only sound she can hear is the wind in the trees. The sun caresses her cheek. Dana smiles.

The ribbon from a text message clouds the top of her screen.

Goodbye Dana. I really hoped that I didn't have to send this message because I...

"What?" Dana asks in the dark of her bedroom. A blanket covers her legs. Moonlight streams in through the window. A clacking noise comes from her radiator. The ribbon disappears from her phone. She clicks over to the her messages and finds a conversation with Terry. The last message is from a few days ago, but the conversation appears at the top of her list. Somebody sent a message, and then they deleted it. A blue feeling rises in Dana's chest and threatens to turn her into a pile of feathers. She starts to thumb out a response.

"What did you just send?"

It takes a few moments for Terry to respond.

"What?"

"You just sent a message. Are we okay?"

"Yeah, why? Also I didn't send anything."

"You did, I just saw the notification. Why are you leaving?"

"...ok Seriously what's going on? I thought your sister was the one who did the pranks and things."

"I—"

And before she can thumb out a response something grabs her by the face and pulls her from her bed

The skin of her cheeks is forced into the space between her teeth. She tries to make a noise like crying out, but there's a hand in her throat, coming from inside. Her molars tingle with pain. Her incisors feel ready to rupture. Her canines are made of cellophane. She blinks motor oil from her eyes and looks forward in time to see, reaching for her, five veiny, spongy fingers, fingers of a hand, of an arm. An arm of a torso, a torso with a neck, a neck belonging to a head connected to a soul named—not named, for her sin is nameless, but announced—as Violet, leading her down a hallway that looked li—

"Eyes on me, Dana," interrupts Violet. The world outside of Violet's face is too blurry to make out, like her countenance distorts reality. Dana stumbles forward, threatening to careen right through her sister but always held away as Violet pulls her, grunting, further backwards down the hallway.

"You're doing great, eyes on me, focus, Dana, focus on me, just look at me, keep walking, we're almost there, Dana, I've been waiting for this for a long time, you're going to be so happy when you—no, just look at me, look, look—it's everything I've wanted for you in all of our lives, Dana, it's the best, just keep looking at me, you'll never have to feel like a rhombus, you'll never fucking LOOK AT ME Dana I want you to know I love you Dana your legs look like pencils but they're still walking, you're walking, we're almost there, I nursed you back to health Dana and this is how you thank me by not looking Dana all I want is for you to look at me why can't you just look, it took so long to get you this good, I just want you to look me in the eye, don't look away from me, don't worry, why don't we just keep walking, it'll be alright, careful now, you don't want to slip on that nodon'tlookdownatitnonononononoahahahahahaha just keep looking forwards at me Dana, just keep walking, I know it must be hard, it's okay, the legs, they're new, you aren't used to having so few of them, it must be hard not being a rhombus, Dana, I know, I was one for a while, but you have to put yourself one foot forwards at a time sweetie, you have to know I love you, I won't squeeze harder if you walk faster, you just got these teeth do you want to have to choke on them already Dana do you want me to take your teeth from you I just gave them to you I can take them back again, Dana, I can keep leading you forwards, is that good, are we almost there, we are, but we'd have been there faster if, I love you, keep walking, okay?—we're almost there—"

"Alughruglaaalghraurlanlphalglh—"

"—I'll eat you, you know, I'll just carve you out and eat you, right now, I bet you taste well, I bet you marinate nicely over fluorescence, Dana, this is all because you put the clipboards away, now isn't that swell, you just couldn't resist, you dirty little thing, we're almost there, don't slip, we're almost there, we're almost there—"

For a moment, Violet's grip loosens, and Dana can see that the color of the walls is herself before Violet's fingers tightens once more and Dana's vision goes blurry again. They wade through her own bodily fluids towards a curtain of white light. The light does to Dana what Violet's grip does to her whole body, holding her in a vice as Violet's words swirl around her head like vanta-black birds, swooping in, carving her up, dive-bombing and slicing her to shreds.






































And then Dana woke up.

With a yawn, she sat up in her bed. Sunlight poured in from the window, putting the shadow of her cactus on the ground. She rubbed at her eyes and used her index fingers to poke the eye crust from her face. Her phone buzzed. She leaned over and picked it up from her bedside table. Ten in the morning. Clocks seemed to work. She tried the finger reality check. Hands as solid as ever. It seemed like she was back in consensus reality. With a sigh, Dana kicked her blanket off and got out of bed, slipping right into her slippers. She wore a pair of men's gym shorts and a baggy t-shirt to sleep. They'd do for making herself breakfast, she figured. Both of her parents were probably at work. Her Dad hadn't had any time to sleep, what with all the covering of the abduction that he had to do, and her mom had decided that throwing herself into her profession would save her the trouble of having to worry about anything personal. This was fine for Dana. She could very well fend for herself.

The door to her room was closed. Another point in the waking world's favor. Dana didn't generally leave it open, and it seemed like the kind of detail that she'd get wrong in a dream. She stepped through the threshold and into the hallway, shutting the door behind her. It felt a little heavy to the touch. Just went to show how desperately Dana needed food, she guessed! She walked past Violet's room—past the tape on the door to see if anyone broke their rule about not going inside (a rule that Dana's own meddling had caused [not for what she did {but for what she found inside}])—and down the stairs. The carpet was warm to the touch. Dana felt like bouncing on it, but dismissed the thought. If she had done something last night that made her go stupid in the morning, she wasn't able to remember it.

The nightmares had been going on for the past thirty or so days. Ever since she learned Violet had been abducted, her dreams had only grown stranger and stranger. It started with something she thought prophetic. A weird bird in a weird town, descending on her and taking all the nightmares with it. They picked up worse once Dana got home and started snooping around Violet's computer. Worse still when she found what was on there. A folder full of bookmarks was all it took to destroy any sort of faith Dana had in her sister. She believed, loosely, in the power of ritual. Everything just clicked into place. Violet willed it to be. Not that she actually caused it—just that she actively wished for it. When the broadcasts came on, Dana watched with bated breath for what Violet would do. She didn't have to wait long before she shot someone. That was just a few days ago. Things have never been worse.

Dana opened the freezer and took out a box of toaster waffles, not bothering to read the label on the box. She felt inside—circle ones? Yeah, circle ones were fine. She put two in the toaster and the box back in the fridge and sat at the table, twiddling her thumbs. Yesterday, her dad told her that tomorrow he'd have the air-conditioners in before he went to work. That was, evidently, not the case. He'd gone through the trouble of moving the boxes they were in back down to the basement, for some reason. Had he decided to try and cool the house via fan? Any moment now Dana expected to get a text from him at the store asking which model she thought was the most energy efficient. Hell if she knew! She just wanted her damn AC. If there was a time to be picky about what it was that cooled her down in this summer heat, it wasn't now.

"Hey Dane," asks Violet, "think you can throw some waffles in for me, too?"

"Sure," Dana answers, getting up from the table.

Of course, her Dad would just wind up picking whichever model he thought was the best. Probably a bunch of box fans, perched in all the wrong places throughout the house. Then one would fall down the stairs and Mom would get mad and all the money they had would spent would go to waste, since they hadn't bothered to keep the receipts. They'd go in the basement, next to all the other stuff the Schmidt household never bothered to return to the store. She was certain that her Dad had tried the whole fan thing a few summers ago, and that if he pulled the same shit again they'd need to rent a storage locker just to put all the fans inside. The coolest storage locker in the country.

"I gotcha, Vi," Carol says, "Dana, you should sit and finish your waffles, okay?"

"Oh, alright," Dana says, sitting back down.

"Thanks, Mom!" Violet says, and flops back down on the couch.

Dana's phone buzzes. That must be him now, she thinks. Asking about box fans and all that. She opens up her phone and, sure enough, there's a notification from her father. Good thing he finally caved about going hands free in the car. He seriously wouldn't stop just picking up the phone and texting at red lights sometimes. Dana knows he's an insanely fast typist, even with just his thumbs, but nobody is fast enough to send the essay-length messages that he's often responsible for and still be ready in time to make the light. It just can't be done. Dana opens the text message and reads it aloud.

"Are we packing for the camping trip tomorrow?" she asks.

"I was gonna, um, do that tonight?" Violet says sheepishly.

"Oh, when are you ever gonna stop putting things off?" Dana says, smiling, turning around in her seat and staring Violet in the face.

Right in the eyes.

Alive.

Here.

Violet.

Dana's blood turns to ice in her veins.

"Wait," she says, "wait, hold on."

"What's wrong?" Violet asks, tilting her head a bit to the side.

"No, fuck this, hold the fuck on, stop, I—"

"Dane?"

"—checked, and the time on my phone was fine, and the fingers, my hands, everything was fine—"

"Uh, you're, uhm, Dana, you're freaking me out a little?"

"Oh, don't get me started," Dana says, standing up from the coffee table. She looks down and sees that she's dressed in clothes that she knows run baggy on her now. She's lost a lot of weight in the past year or so, and these clothes should not be fitting as well as they do. She—

"Wait," she says, holding her hand out in front of her face and counting her fingers, "Violet, what, uh, don't ask questions but, what year is it?"

A look of concern finds its way onto Violet's face.

"Twenty seventeen," she says, "um, are you okay?"

Dana Schmidt has five fingers.

[MethodicalSlacker]

---

/ldW 4GN DMD 329_[ [] __ [/;]
Extract From Document Titled: Shitty Poem Shit

[+] Oh Dearest

OH DEAREST

HOW I WISH I COULD BEGET YOU HERE
TO SIT AND IMMOLATE WITH ME
IMBIBE ROLLING CLOUDS OF PALE SMOG
AFLOAT IN A TRIBUTARY OF HAZY FRAGRANT
PRUSSIAN ZYKLON BLUES; I’D MAKE YOU COME
TO THE TONES OF A NUMBERS STATION
A SIREN CALL ARRANGED CULINARY
IN THEE PRESIDENT POLK’S DESICCATED MAW
FOR MUTUAL MASTICATION’S SHARED PLEASURE
IN THE CONFOUNDING AND FAMILIAR DIMENSIONS OF
NOSTALGIA’S SANCTUM, INFIRMARY

ONE DAY,
I SHALL MAKE YOU AS KNOWN IN YOUR HEAVENLY BODY
AS I FEEL A STRANGER IN THE STARS OF MINE

---

/tr1 3r/rf 182[]214 81[3___ [/td]

Terry Lee phone June 26 2018 at 10:18 AM 0:00 ⬤—————————————— -1:16 ▶ Transcription Beta (low confidence) “Hey __ it’s a call me back I need to __ parents called me asking about where you be are ____ _ ___ come pick you Up __ __ really sorry about how last we me talked you __ ____ wrong about ___ ___ _ ______ advocate like I _____ do ___ ___ __ ____ soon love you __ safe please okay hanging up, bye.” Was this transcription useful or not useful?

---

[MethodicalSlacker]

Dana kicked down the door of her house and jumped over the front steps. Her ankles bent as she hit the pavement, sending her stumbling down into the street. Teetering back to stability, she started to sprint down the median of the road, barren of barricades and free from the scuttling of oversized arachnids. She held her phone aloft as she ran, one eye on the road and the other fixed on the time and date in disbelief—in perpetuity—in stark lucidity. Auburn leaves fell into open drains collecting rainwater on the side of the road.

The date refused to change. It wouldn't change when she blinked. It wouldn't change when she pinched herself, or counted the number of fingers on each of her hands. It wouldn't change when she tried to pass her fingers through her palm, or when she looked at a clock and saw how it spun too fast, slow, or counter. None of that was enough to turn the calendar ahead.

The date refused to change, and the dream refused to end.

If she were early enough in her calendar of nightmares to trust the smell of the air, Dana would believe this dream to be real. If she had not, many nights ago, abandoned the idea that she could ever reliably tell one side of sleep from the other, she would know it from the monotonous scraping sound of televisions flickering in her neighbor's windows. She'd know it in the pavement and how her feet dragged themselves over the ground without touching it, her ankles twisting in their sockets all the same. With every whisper in the wind, this world screamed at her that it was real. It pushed her nose deep and hard into the scent of early autumn like it wanted Dana to know her role in the turning of the leaves.

Dana kept running. It was all she had at this point. She put her phone back into the space from whereabouts she pulled it and turned looking over her shoulder when she came to her first traffic light dangling pendant and empty above the street, its glass devoid of color. As far as she could tell, there was nobody following her. Nobody in general. The storefronts on the four way intersection were empty of people, of spirits, of life. In the distance Dana heard the sound of tires crunching stones, and she waited at the corner for them to come closer. Her patience wore thin in even slimmer time. On and on the wheels turned, rubber rolled, never getting closer, never getting further away. Dana sneered, picked up her feet, and took off down the median once again.

Empty Chattanooga rolled on over the horizon. Dana felt no more or less tired than when she began running, yet she knew she had several miles behind her by now. If she could not escape the dream by force of will, she'd run it down to its conclusion. Dana saw in the median an incredibly strong arrow, crisscrossing itself endlessly in search of a place with no roads. She'd know she'd reached the end of the road where she found the arrow's point. Then she'd know where to go next. She passed by the haunting grounds of her youth; the record store, the Blue House Café where she worked, empty houses caught in the spaces between—

—but suddenly, they were the spaces below. Dana's feet moved up and down, like trying to pedal a bike, kicking her up through the sky like a diver breaching the surface of blue water for clear air. The ground receded from view and Dana floated on a sunbeam into the sky.










Someone below was still running. Dana could see the faint outline of someone in her place running, still, along the median. No, on closer inspection it remained herself. Her body, her appearance, all her habits and features. She flew, and she ran, and from above she could see the road stretch on for miles across an endless Chattanooga, cities upon rivers and hills for miles and miles out to the edge of the horizon.

Dana suppressed a panic-stricken scream. Her body tilted and whirled in the wind as she struggled against the wind to remain upright. As long as she could keep her eyes on the road ahead, she'd make it to the end of the dream. A hard gust struck her like a whip across her right eye and split it open across, spilling blood and white jelly into the breeze—Dana let loose the shriek she'd been saving and raised her hands to her face, losing balance in the process, tumbling over herself in cartwheels under the blue expanse.

When she finally levels out with her stomach pointed toward the ground like a skydiver's, she takes her hands from her face and sees with her last eye a leviathan of clouds, all dark and gray and storming with red velvet bolts of lightning. Arms flapping in the cold wind, Dana hurtled through the cloud storm, the world popping in her ears. Dana's body on the ground ran across a dirt path in a field of pale reeds on stone as white as the surface of the moon. Even from above, the air smelled of salt and fish. White marble houses emerged on parabolic arches and curved thresholds from the earth. Creatures of the faded past and the burning present mingled in harmony, dressed in cobalt and silk. Dana Below made her way through the crowd, into a mosaic square. Something emerges from the cloud mass—a thin black shape with a red streak of an eye—and after it slithers a serpentine cirrus that reaches through the air and swallows Dana of the Sky into the storm whole.











Caught in the belly of the cloud, Dana of the Sky struggles to find purchase in the wet cumulus. She eventually finds a hold on thick rain and punches her way out of the snake, tearing puffy cloud fiber from watery sinew. The wind sucks her out and into a new world—she finds herself against a cloudless sky, falling beneath the sun, above a vast and empty desert. Dana of the Sky sees herself following the last painted traces of the median to a town at the heart of the line. The desert stretches on for miles. On one side of the sky, the side behind Dana, a storm is brewing. A dark wave builds on the other, rolling across the land from ground to sky, a thick wall of dust. Dana Below whirls down the road in torn rags and ribbon trails of blood. Following closely behind at her heels are the biting jaws of seven wolves, each with silver coats of fur and wide smiling rows of sharp teeth. On the horizon, a shining metal dome rises from the center of a ghost-town forgotten to the sand. Dana of the Sky starts to descend, falling slowly down over herself. Dana Below is running for the dome. Before her is a chasm, a crack in the road, separating her from the path ahead. Dana Below tries to leap over it and falls in. The wolves jump howling after her, all except for the last, which stays on the precipice and watches the others tumble down below the ground.

Dana of the Sky lands on the other side of the chasm and runs on the faded yellow of the median toward the town and the dome behind it. The light of the sun thickens and shifts redder, darker, until the open sky is shut fast with night. Spires of light shoot out from open lamps and streetlights in the desert town, getting brighter as the tops of Dana's feet scrape fast against the road. The light catches a shifting in the sky—Dana looks up and sees a swirling mass of crows, black feathered with red eyes, swarming above the city. As Dana feels herself take down the town's main street she sees the streets here are just as empty as Chattanooga's, save for shattered glass and clear splinters jutting up from the ground. Dana feels them run against four times more feet than she feels she should have. She pulls her hands to her face—and sees four red shelled stumps stuck through with glass and broken stones.

Breaking the boundary of the cloud had transformed her.

A hill's shadow bent to cover a bend in the road, drowning any light that tried to cross. Dana plunged through it, scraping against the median with her long, shelled legs, tracing the dent in the ground where the line ran through until she emerged onto a straight road on the other side. The ball of crows swirled above a convergence of street lamps in the center above a traffic island. In the crossed lights stood—

"Terry?"

—stood someone small, too far from Dana's sight for her to tell. The figure was facing her, and looked like they were standing still. Breathing slowly, Dana scuttled forward across the pavement. The figure seized up, straightened, and turned to run out of sight. Dana's legs stabbed down harder, shattering glass and cracking the rock, propelling her further and further with each push until each of the eight of them cracked and echoed loud where they split the road. Dana passes under the ball of crows, and as she passes they take off, streaming out in straight lines under the light. Dana lifts herself from the medians of the ground and follows the trail of black feathers through the town, moving from pavement to dirt.

She turns onto a tree-lined street where the feathers run thickest. The spilled glass is met by scraps of flesh and splatters of viscera, torn clothes and tufts of black feathers and hair. Shredded bodies hung by their wrists from the trees, their jaws split open. Softly they moaned into the wind, their pained chorus heralding the sound of a church bell somewhere in the distant night. The figure was getting closer as they lost speed, batting away the crows and making another turn at the end of the tree-lined street. Dana could feel her legs galloping beneath her, tearing a scar beneath her, echoing the beats between the bell tolling beneath her.

Dana turns on the corner just in time to see the figure struggle with the door to her house. Something on Dana's face smiles and she shutters forward, barely feeling herself in each point of space before the next. The figure turns—something dangles from the side of her face, a thin black cord falling against the figure's collarbone. The longer Dana looks and the closer she gets, the less the figure looks like Terry. But the resemblance is enough that Dana keeps going, hurtling down the sidewalk, reaching the front step just as the figure throws the door open and slams it behind her. Dana cried out and stabbed her spindly stubs into the door, trying to break through. The figure stood on the other side, holding it closed.

She pushes, stabs, spears the door, sending splinters crumbling to the floor. The foundation of the house shook, the door threatened to dislodge from the hinges. From inside, a scream rings out, and Dana echoes it with a call of her own. She twists at the knob, sticks her limbs between the gaps underneath, slams herself against the outside.



But she is unable to break through.



Dana lays collapsed in a red heap at the foot of the door, her eight legs sprawled out, drooping as far back as the front steps. The joints inside her red shell are compressed and bent inward, leaving her a tangled mess of painful angles and carapace. From her unhinged jaw a sob broke loose, though it took Dana a few moments to recognize the sound as such. She would later describe the sound as a cross between the yowl of an injured housedog and the guttural moan of a submerged crocodile. A thin yellow mucus runs from each of Dana's eyes, catching in the hard flares of shell under her chin. Flakes of chitin stain the wood floorboards of the porch, coating it in a thin layer like sawdust.

It is in this moment that Dana begins to realize just what she has become. The fount of her sobs becomes her realization of her new, grotesque form, not the loss of Terry's companionship. She tries to pick herself up, and something catches in the wood beneath—the tip of one of her legs caught in the gap between boards. Dana tries to call out once more for someone, anyone, behind her or behind the door. Instead a dark green slime shoots from between her teeth and stains the side of the wall by the door. The grinding and pressure beneath her shell feels like it could split her at any moment. Dana imagines this is how a tree being hacked down feels. Bending, bending, bending, waiting for the break—



Something behind the door unhinges and it swings open.



Golden light pours from the top of the hallway. Dana looks up from the spotless floor into it, and then some ways below.





And then,







only then.



does Dana finally wake up.