"Waiting for a Shoulder on Which to Perch"

#0072. It has become common to not believe in evil. It has become common to paint cruelty and devastation with a brush of compassion and empathy, seeking humane ground, seeking knowledge, understanding, connectivity. Evil gets relegated to simplistic folk, people too ignorant and guileless to perceive the gray nuance of existence. But it is another lie. Dirty things, lies. Evil is real. It lives among you. It hops from shoulder to shoulder. Devils pull at your beard. Devils lick salt from your weeping eyes. They are there in the hearts of oppressors and instigators to violence. Ignore the Devils at your peril. But, no, you ignore that at all of our peril.

"Alistair by the Lamppost"

#0073. Outside the anteroom of the secret place is Alistair, he is a friendly face, so sadly drunken. He spills secrets because his mind is addled. Sad thing, that. Such a waste. Friendly face. Sadly stumbling. This is all it is, that's his big secret. To endure you need to waste yourself. Burn up in the atmosphere or live immortal in the wallow. He knows the right choice. He gives the answer to anyone who will ask. He is the reason I can hear the Giant's cry from the edge of space. Alistair is everyone. I am as foreign to him as he is to me. He's the one who's not alone.

"Alice Towers Above All Else"

#0074. Come listen. She speaks so much. She speaks so quickly. She has no fear in her. What could she fear? The morning I met her, she had rode across the Sun in some flaming chariot. She had settled warfare and famine and pestilence and even death. She was so beautiful. She shimmered angelic. She brought with her no host of heaven. Just porcelain face. Porcelain hands. You've been away too long she said to me. And I knew she was correct. But she still can never answer my question of Dear Alice, what, pray tell, is the point of it all?

"Elisabeth and Wiley"

#0075. Do not thank me, she says to him. The Mountain is immobile. I could not pass it without help, he says to her. She demurs. The Mountain is immobile. The two stand at the only pass. Elisabeth knows the way well. In those dangerous reaches, she prays to a god that Wiley cannot believe in. They don't move of their own accord. Each little step is orchestrated by a higher power. If they knew, they would just fall down and let the gods do all the lifting.

"The Prophet"

#0076. The sky opens up and it spits forth its one and only Prophet. Other Prophets had been liars emboldened by the lust of followers and the power of cult. They spilled like serpents into the muddy bath. I would like to assume the mantle of it. In the depth of night, I feel the Tongues again inside my brain. That should be me spat out by the sky. He has no Tongues that I do not possess. I wanted for meaning so badly. I was going to fix it all. Instead I became this.

"Shadows"

#0077. The tomb has no warden. The prison has no gatekeeper. It is a place of honor system incarceration. But there are so many Shadows. When you try to leave their side, they stitch themselves right up to you. The whole of the secret place is just Shadow. You can try to speak to them but they cannot respond. You are taught to believe they are mimics. But Shadows travel to places untraceable. They survive in memories and consume the poor victim's intellect. Shadows leave the brain in place and semi-autonomous when they finally assume a human identity.

"The Breathing Specter"

#0078. I don't want to open my eyes. She is waiting for me. She is always there waiting for me. She exists between spaces. I can feel her breath on my face. There is a chill to it. She is a breathing specter. She wants me to look into her eyes but I refuse to open mine. I can feel her moving closer. She is always drawing closer. I won't open my eyes. That won't keep her at bay.

"I Try and I Try and I Try, But I Cannot Ignore It"

#0079. This thing writhes inside of me, jagged teeth out, green skin, foul and grotesque. Like some ancient worm plunging through my gut. I push back on it, but its jaw is powerful and the wounds it leaves behind are gaping holes. Could you imagine being so empty and hollow? I disassemble myself, piece by piece, looking for its horrid head. It burrows deep. I cannot excise it. I twist. It has fouled everything inside me.

"Better Left Unexamined, Better Left Untouched"

#0080. It is a formation. A solitary conglomeration of events. The focal point. You want to have some energy behind you. You want there to be a silvery light that shines in everything. You want to believe in a soul. You look deep inside yourself and find the chamber where it should reside. It is a formation, there. This concretion of your memory and your hope. You can pull it out. It shines with that silvery light you want. But it's so fragile. The pieces of it shed like the scales of butterfly wings. And you lose momentum as it dies in the open air.

"The Moment You Are Untethered Is The Moment You Are Free To Spiral Out"

#0081. Where she lodges in your heart you stay to be kept leashed like a dog and relegated to some dustbin memory of hers she keeps you tethered for herself but she lets go in warm weather and you fall through time and space so alone so isolated so alone it is your own fault she will whisper as you degrade and decompose in the wilds she wanted nothing to do with you but you were always so there so there and now she can be free and you will fall and fall and fall until your lips are gone and the last drop of you dissolves in the aether.

"Chrysalis"

#0082. You are pieced together again. And you will face the same devastation. One day you will be free of the malady. You know how you will attain your freedom. You have built plan after plan after plan. No jail can hold you. No tomb can seal you in. You are stitched together from dead things. From cold things. Each failure of the will frosts your breath. Put it all together again. You emerge from a makeshift chrysalis. You are reborn and ready to die again.

"Innocent"

#0083. My innocence is no secret. I am the startled pup. I am the wounded fawn. I am apart and separate in my naivete. The world laps at my soul. It degrades and demoralizes me. I never grew up. I never came of age. I am a mewling orphan. I am not fit to survive, here. I see the little things ground up and terrorized and I cannot stand up in its face. The Giant howls at the edge of space and it shakes me to my core. The adults are playing dress up. I want them to wither and melt away.

"Sonder"

#0084. Every window leads to a life distinct from your own. I try so hard to remain apart and aloof. Or I try so hard to not be so apart and aloof. I cannot remember what happens by will and what happens by accident. Am I alone by design? Every window has a life inside of it. Someone like me. Living a life like mine. Having hopes and fears like mine. They live parallel to me. We'll never touch. We'll never meet. I wonder how lonely they are? I do not think I would like them.

"Oh"

#0085. The secrets stack up and up and up. I stumble through the doors and the feeling of them takes my breath away. They steal breath. I pictured things like files or books. But secrets are living things. They wriggle and they spit venom. They are hideous. They carry with them a tremendous stench. They are vile things. The stack up and up and up. The place is overrun with them.

"What Even is This, What am I Seeing?"

#0086. My fondest wish is to just close my eyes and never open them again. Breathless. Still.

"Butterflies"

#0087. The trilling hits just at the thought of her. The stomach loops upon itself and he is weightless. She doesn't notice him floating. Maybe she does. The sweat beads up behind his skin. He careens heedlessly inward. There is anxiety in every little moment. Every strand of her hair. A stray eyelash. He is consuming himself. He melts with her every minor movement. He is lost inside of her.

"Greetings From the Moon"

#0088. Standing above it all. The Earth in tilt and spinning, pulling her world in orbit. She raises the Sea up. She lets it recede. There is such peacefulness here. The light of the universe is so clear. Blue and green fade to dull brown. She can watch the ants eat themselves. Here she is the Queen she was always meant to be. She sits on a throne of ancient mineral. The halo of stars is her crown.

"The Hollowed"

#0089. Little screaming from wherever you are. Those dying breaths still hollow out your bones. You could never believe in such fancy endings. You know about the worms. You know about the dust and the ash. Don't give it a coat of fresh lacquer. It is what all things are. It is wretched. It is polluted. Bear up that grim menace. Forget those rose covered books.

"Fools Believe the Things That Fools Cannot Help but Believe"

#0090. You shouldn't believe in anything, Alice will tell you. Even though she is the absolute thing to believe in. I met her in so many places. You would expect doves to descend. Sunbeams through rent clouds. Storms. Booming voices. Angels with fiery swords? Earthquakes. Devastation. Time standing still. But instead, it is this overwhelming and discomfiting calm. It is a calm so dense that it hurts. You are a fool, she will tell you. But there will be a sweetness to her voice. You are a fool because that is what she intends. You never had a choice in the matter.

"Alice Dreams of Purpose, You Dream of Alice"

#0091. She will shatter you. But it is ok. You will be content being shattered. After all, what is there to live for? Family will crumble and decompose like exterminated mice. Friends will abandon you. Their ships will sink as soon as they crest the horizon. Meaning is too grandiose. Alice may find meaning in the universe, but you are a measly speck. You are a worrying dust mote. So she will come to you, maybe in a dream, and she will undo you, piece by piece. And, to your surprise, you will find yourself thanking her.

"Home"

#0092. The prisoner shuts his eyes and remembers home. The music that plays in his head warbles like an old phonograph record. He has been lost for so long. Each step pulls him further away from his home. Look at the scars on his wrists and arms. He has tried to abandon ship. He spent his days inches from drowning waters. Icy waters. He closes his eyes tightly and thinks of the sweetness of home. The water laps up against the rocks. He peers in and sees his own reflection, warped and degraded by the waves. He cannot do this forever.

"Raven of the Life Unlived"

#0093. The majority of lives are wholly unlived. The roads that lead away from what happened are more numerous by far than the ones that travel through actuality. Somewhere, Raven is held in her father's arms. She looks up at him. He cannot imagine his life without her. But his life is genuinely without her. She exists in an unlived life. He sees her sometimes. She never had the chance to miss him the way that he misses her.

"The Unforgotten Museum of Scent and Memory"

#0094. Those smells are what cling to memory. Opening a sticking door and being hit with the scent of age and accumulated detritus. The moldering wood and the loose banister. The aroma of boiling potatoes and dense bread wafting down in a nearly visible cloud. Each stair groaning under even negligible weight. It was the heavy air of a museum loosed and rushing into my nostrils. It is still there even now. The house has long crumbled. Every inhabitant long dead or relocated. But the place still exists in the memory of its particular odor.

"Their Faces are Your Faces"

#0095. Ghastly remainders of what has come before. You are unable to escape the things that precede you. They are unavoidable. They are obstacle born. Looming up. Growing from the cellar of you like weeds. Those faces have all lived your life before you. They slipped on your skin and paraded through history. Their faces are your faces. You look into mirrors and see her. God is watching you watching her watching you. The second world is the secret place. You glimpse it and it will take you with it as it dissolves into the aether. It all goes away.

"Angel"

#0096. Their first message is always a command to curb your fear and horror. Because at their core, they are horrors themselves. Timeless and unknowable, limbs of the everlasting God. They descend from realms you cannot touch or perceive. You give them wings. You give them a halo. They are eternal, but so dependent upon your belief. You have such authority over them. They are soulless automatons. Even when they rebel it's part of her her script. But still, wouldn't you hate to see them go?

"In Desperate Need of a Narrator"

#0097. Is there a story here? Can you read it in the lights that blur out on rainy nights? I feel like there is some sort of magic in all of it. A stillness that replicates the second world. The secret place is full of those things. Ciphers written in light. Ancient texts that are spilled out in obscured luminescence. Music floating down in raindrops, quivering and distorting what was solid and bright under sunlight. If there is a story here, we are nearing the first chapter's end. The prisoner is lost in these lights. Alice is watching him. Athena is lush and gorgeous. The angels may leave us all to die. And Itchy will search hell and back for the answers he seeks.

"The Idol of the Bees"

#0098. The Idol is great, but greater still are the other actors, the other cosmic agents who file their dossiers and reports amongst the cabinets and libraries of the secret place. But the Idol of the Bees is still majestic. He gives form to the hives and collects the intellects of a thousand million fragile little pieces. Your majesty, they say to him, and he bows and they bow and they dance together. He scatters them to the wind. They are like fairy dust to him. They collect nectar and they spit honey and they worship at his altar. He has no real equal. He is as scared and as alone as anyone else is.

"Frozen Charlotte"

#0099. Charlotte, once, held the temple of Athena. She built it from broken shears, and Jupiter's tears, and lucid dreams, and Lucifer herself. She cobbled it together from telephone wires and bits of broken asphalt and keys and secret drunkenness and guilt and worry and shame. And one day, after years of occupancy, she just walked out one day. She sailed away with a gentleman and her boat crested the horizon. Did she dip beneath the icy waters? Athena blows out a candle on the Moon in memory of poor Frozen Charlotte.

"The First Secret Name of God"

#0100. The stained glass bookends of a life lived in cathedrals falls and it shatters open and from it spill the first of twenty one secrets. All of it spills out like blood from the stained glass bookends. They leak and flounder on the tile floor of the church basement. Hidden in the various forbidden closets and stairwells. Near the belfry and the frayed rope that sounds the alarm. In that library, you will find all twenty one secrets. Twenty one names of God. The first name, we have seen it so much of course, is Alice. Alice. Alice. Alice.

"Against the World"

#0101. Her eyes show you how valueless and empty the vessel is. Grotesque. The rancid population rises from their filthy beds to wallow in their clutter and base libertine revelries. They march and they cavort. They raise glasses and they sway to music. I hate them. I hate their joy. She sees them for what they are. Perverts and imbeciles. Worthless droning cattle. She and I loathe them together. Us against the world. That's all I want.