PALE MANIPULATOR MUSIC

November 1st.

Simps pound drums in my head.
Simps going ba-ba-ba ba-da-da-da-da-DA.
Simps going 1-2-3 1234 5-6.

I want to say, I don't want to be here.  No.

That rhythm's wrong is what I say in my head as he goes upside it.
He, also inside my head.
He, marching next to me but outside the line.

He is da commanduh.  

I am cavalry.  There's me, but there is also We.  We is 11 soldiers and the commander, Josh.  
I don't count.  I know it's 11 people all together because 11 is 2 more than all the fingers I have and also the number that comes before Josh's number of years, total.

Our cavalry is fierce.  We ride no horses or jeeps.  We ride in heads, which ride shoulders, which ride torsos and lower body portions.

It's a little like VOLTRON, boy- and girl-powered cavalry.  

Heads are the best kind of jeep because they are never running out of fuel.  Anything can fit into a head, too.

Josh is bigger than me and fits comfortably inside my head.  There are other places he cannot fit, but the head is vast, like I said.  

I have memories also in my head:  

Of cavalry engagements on open fields, where we do best against those without vehicles.
Of graves where there is many bodies shot up with 762, which is a special number that counts you instead of you counting it.  
Of Josh not fitting into places (ouch).  

Memories are like fuel for a car, but high-octane, performance fuel.  The Big One—the great commander who fits all of us (even Josh) inside her head—says that memories are the most dangerous thing that can fit in heads.  They are what drives cavalry doctorin', which I guess is what the cavalry does when it is ma-lingering.

Ma-lingering is the feeling you get when you miss Ma, but you also shot her through the head and spilled all her memories on the ground.  It makes you go to the doctor.  The doctor slaps you and says "get back to the front, you're a soldier, remember?"

Memories burn as hot as diesel.  But we can't really use memories to burn our own shit.  For that, we use regular diesel.

Lately, there are a lot of bagpipes in my head.  Drums as well.  Ban-joes.

Lately, I am wondering what it would be like to be in another head.

Lately, I am considering volunteering to clear mines, but that is simp work.  

Simps volunteer.

I have never volunteered for anything.

November 2nd.

In my dreams, I am always writing apologies to The Big One.

My apologies say “sorry We were stealing your Spotify Premium account, please release us from this curse.  signed, We.”  My apologies are a combination of angles that speak for me when I’m looking right at them, similar to a UNICEF worker.  Their speaking helps: I don’t understand writing.

The Big One is in my dreams, but it’s only her up to the knee—Muppet Babies—and this makes dream sense but not waking sense because we carry her portrait into the towns we overtake.  I am much smaller than The Big One, which makes real sense but not dream sense because the dream is mine and everything in it should also be me, not We.  

Anyway.  The Big One is wearing her boots when the dream begins, but takes them off.  Her socks are striped, not dark like they should be.  Her robes are at knee-height, higher than they should be.  When she removes her socks in the dream, her skin is tan and on her bones, tanner and on-er than it should be.  Her feet smell, but not like cadaverine.

The dream is displaced—my family, as seas rise—and now we’re driving a car.  The Big One’s talking, depressing pedals with bare feet, or maybe sandals, can’t tell.  

I lean over to tell.  
I write “sorry.”  

I want to tell.  It was Ann.  Ann wanted us to steal it.  Ann’s hack tool.  Ann’s dumb ass.  [ Ann’s dirty jeans (for some reason?) ]

The dream is water in a cauldron—the world, as red flags unfurl—and The Big One is saying “it needs more cilantro.”

I’m awake, on my back.  

There’s a smell like cilantro-taste when I pull my hand from my jorts.

December 14th.

It is on today, the year of our lord, that I am giving testimonies about The Big One before this court.

The Big One is old.  She is so old that she has been traipsing around this continent or the other since they were all one continent (one love).  She is older than time and space.  She is much older than us, her boy- and girl-soldiers, me being at least my number of fingers old + some number that I do not know.  

She is the perfect age, perfectly well preserved for her age, and still cute if you are an asking gentleman.  

She is more old than the 4.5 billion years which is the Half Life of depleted uranium, and she is never half an hour late.  She is a wizard, and arrives precisely when it is "economically viable."    

We have never, ever used depleted uranium in our doing of war.  Like ever, as Taylor Swift would say.  

Depleted uranium is so hard that it pierces tank shells and forces the people out or dead, like what is happening when someone cruel gathers together faggots outside a village and forces them to kiss (admitting wrong to Creator) or be beaten to tears (admitting wrong to themselves).  I am not admitting wrong here.

Depleted uranium lingers in the soil and firmament, creating problems for years to come, like a problem child who shoots dogs that are not strays with a nail gun.  I am not admitting to killing any animals.

Depleted uranium creates childhood leukemia, which diverts Ronald McDonald from his primary duties of hamburger cook to burial orderly as they fade quickly and become skeletons that eventually stand still.  The skeleton on trial today, a grand General of The Big One, is capable of a great deal and has rarely "stood still" except as a stone wall among the flying bullets and shells.  Indeed, he is standing in the stead of the Big One, answering for her, as she is very busy and cannot be here to be tried herself.  I am not admitting to being a skeleton (yet).  

For closure of my testament, I would tell you of my service in the Big One's armies, under the foot of this General and with lesser, unmoving skeletons under my feet.  The Big One herself has always treated me with respect.  When recruiting me by force, the Big One did not ask—as inferior militia commanders do—"is it a boy or a girl", she asked "is it normal?"  When my mother and father tried to explain that I was "asocial", the Big One took me anyway, saying "What do you think you should do to them, people who say that you are basically retarded?"  

I am not admitting to killing my parents.  

December 25th.

Today on our hunt for a christmas fowl we have found instead two tweety birds.

Their cage is a bungalow in the Great and Powerful district, where they are shivering for the December cold, and for effect.  G&P district still has grid and WIFI, and because it is christmas, Josh the commander says, "you can shower here if you want."

Though it is said by Misdemeanor Elliot in her song that she don't want no 1-minute man, the militia in general—and Josh in particular—does want that because if you are taking any longer to shower, they are sure to cut off the water.

When I shower, I wash only my hands.

While We are commandeering 11 minutes of steam and soap bubbles in the birds' bathroom, Josh is questioning them about their tweets.  

"You are two very noisy birdos," is what I am hearing of his words as he takes their information and whatever else he feels like. 

"It is all on the box!" screams one of them between skin-on-skin noises.  

The cloud is what they are talking about.  

I make a friendly wager to Pascal (some corporal with nothing to prove) that they will exist in the clouds soon enough and I am only a little shocked when I see Josh and a political officer leading them out.  Shocked in the automatic stomach-feeling way, because what I see is electric, building static in various parts of me: they are in birthday suits, and unless one shares a date with Creator, it is not their special day.  

We take them to another cage on the outskirts of town.  This one is a hole cut roughly in red dirt.

Ann and Peter, who spent this morning digging, object passionately to using this hole.

“It’s too big for two dykes.  They are skinny things, just look at them!  We have dug this here for two men!”

"Yeah!!  This is a man-hole!"

"Manhole!"

“Stop,” Josh says.  

The political officer is giving Ann, the primary complainant here, a look that says “are you stupid?” but doesn’t actually say it.  Until he does.  Then it’s both the look and him saying it.

“Does it fucking matter which hole you use?” Josh asks, exhausted.

Ann says something smart (dumb) that gets her backhanded.  Her “it only matters before Creator” joke falls flat on the ground, like her.  

The birds seem scared, but out here in this wilderness they are not tweeting about it.

Overhead, missiles.  

Stars. 

BANG.

(two smaller, closer bangs).

July 25th.

Water parks are legendary fun, and I can really not say anything against them.

Today, I am saying little about myself, because I am an elemental of the waves, with liquid good brainwaves.  These feet that I don’t have are kicking in the deep end of this pool.  These memories that I don’t have are being sucked down drains only to reenter on the other side, filtered, with an impact that feels like a gentle massage for someone’s back or lower parts. 

(I, We, are naked today.)

“Clear water for clear progress,” is what a political officer sang to us while we stood, cocked, in the swamp country, our troops taking frequent dips with bellypanged gators (and less frequently returning to the surface).  The sight of the spiraling orange tower gave us enough get-up to overrun the city, and this tower, I have slid down it more than once now.  Every splash coats my stomach with good slosh.

Josh cries, “Anyone who speaks about the bush today walks the plank!”, as he sends poolside comrades into the breach with his foot (splash).

Loud music says swears and anatomy (splash).

I sling blue magic at Ann, because I am a spell man who is all about whipping water (splash).   

Two bristly old uncles, officers in the regular army, give Moon and Nissa rides, and there is a lot of one-way saluting.  The girls wear expressions that dart between good slosh, bad slosh, bathroom feeling, or sad slosh—an emotional baseball diamond with bases loaded—but water dilutes all other fluids.

Midday, one of the general officers blows the whistle.  We snap to attention and grip the side of the pool, the closest thing to a trench berm.  He says, while laughter makes his pangless belly rumble, “I fucking order you to... do as much brown-brown,” this man is really gasping, “... do as much brown-brown as you can.  Fuck.”  Some are panicking.  Are we to be sent again to chase and follow bullets?

Then, Josh dives into the deep end and starts splashing around.  The general climbs to the top of the orange slide, jumps off, and does a cannonball.  

Total immersion, nose-burn, coughing fit.  

A chill overtakes us.  

This witchdoctor with 3 temporary starfish tattoos slices my upper arm.  The starfish are on his chest, where a general’s stars would be.  I realize the pool is red.  Somebody shouts, “HELL IS REAL”, which is our battalion’s motto.  Something rubs me like itching powder being poured onto an itch.

My pupils dilate. 

June 17th.

Today in the Great and Powerful district, there are very many developments.  We have been doing much stacking and digging and filling.  

Mostly we are stacking and filling, because the polite nature of G&P denizens ("beyond docility", as Josh the Commander says) encouraged them—with our artillery's help—to carve out spaces for storing departed loved ones: in between interstate medians, in front yards, in green carpet-fields where rich people play with their balls.

The Big One, who puts expired people back into the life with sorcery in the same way a coach will be agitating on the sidelines saying "Number 11, you are fresh enough to smash some more heads!", has told us to box up all the siege-succumbed, exit-wound-abundant, black, torn and bones-showing people we find and put them in the ground until they are skeletons.  

We follow our orders.  Lots of the boxes are cardboard or plywood because we used all the pines for our own: Cojak, Brand, Laela, Gorsch, Bennett, Bobby, Dawn.  The pine and embalming will make their skeletoning slow, and the last to be skeletons will be great Generals. 

The training center is full of life, unlike the rest of this community, which is suffering a bit of a downturn.  Everyone who has more years than I have toes and fingers has been followed by bullets, because youth, We are the future.  The center was once a pool, where the big animal called K-12 drank.  K-12 is a predator who eats children and makes paper pellets called “ticky-tacky.”  I have never seen a K-12, but We are finding its feces everywhere in the training center.  Nasty creature.

August 4th.

I do not like Mondays.  

I do not shiver from fear, only from the breeze.

I do not like this new regular army commander.

Two of these are true, and one is becoming true as I drink from the truth serum, which is akin to alchemy in that it helps convert falsehoods to realities.  I am passing the serum around like the doctors who don’t respect boundaries.  Everyone is now guarded against pants-peeing, insult, and Ebola.  

A sniper is somewhere danger-far, and their bullets have been passing danger-close, creating many ostentatious exits like TV people on red carpets.  The carpet in the bungalow I am in is maroon, because that is where a bullet departed Timbo's body before Timbo departed us.  

Our nighttimes are a long stretch, a cat lady doing yoga, because this commander bitch is telling us “Shut off all lights!  Bullets behave like moths!”  She is a bookish officer, graying, Browning.  Josh says that the siege of the Great and Powerful District fell from her head like lucky stars.  “We are fortunate for her,” he says.  “I want to rape her,” he says, also.  

Regardless, Shadow Puppet Hour is a non-starter with her.  We need it to relax, and have said as much, to deaf ears.  We need to see our shadows sometimes.  We are not vampires.  

But the bullets of a sniper are dark magic.  Math, a sorcery known to people other than me, vibrates within them.  They are math and moth, I guess.  Cicadas, actually.  Coming out of their shells with the sole purpose of creating screeching and buzzing among us.  Each person hit is a diatribe of beetlery.  Their timely expirings come with questions—“why, where, how?”—which we answer with grieving shots towards distant hills, or fists smashed into bungalow walls.

Ann is talking to me most nights.  She is always saying, “We are fools to just sit here!  We will sit until we lay down and our markers are standing up!”

There is no way to know who will be followed by a sniper bullet.  Some report that they follow for blocks, like lovesick dogs.  Josh says one followed him for a time, then turned a corner and ran into someone else.  

“I was doing like a woman walking through the Gainful District, minding my step and the bounce of my rump, to make myself undesirable to it!”

Josh is wise.  I respect his looking out for us.  Ann says she would collaborate if Josh wanted to do a frag against this regular army commander.  

At some juncture during twilight, while the moon is still being roused by its CO to do exercises, I peek out the window and see the Sniper’s deathly spark.  It is near, to my mind.  I can put a finger in front of my eye and cover the hill it came from.  I can close my two fingers around it and crush the farmer’s silo on top of that hill.

I duck and look behind me to see if the bullet is on my tail.  It is not, so I sprint to the commander.

She said, “Not now.”

I salute, then begin stammering.  

Nissa hears me and rushes into the command bungalow.  She pushes me aside and makes a plea on my behalf.  She says that my information is trustworthy, despite my stature.  She is a gifted child, a brain on a stick, and knows how to surround her words with honey—just as mucous surrounds feces—delivering them unto elders with the least amount of friction.

The commander is engaged riding Big Jim, a regular army mong with shoulders too broad for his number of years.  Riding boots.  Riding crop.  Riding goggles.  No other gear.  Her finger is mostly what she shows us.

She said, “Not now.”

The witchdoctor comes in to report butchery.  Two fallen on the western perimeter, one on the east.  He makes a sign in the air that is meant to convey sorcerous meaning to the ether where djinns watch constantly for signals, but it also carries some apparent corporeal message, because the commander pauses.  She thinks, still touching Big Jim, then nods.

She said, “Not now.”

Josh is the last to come, striding into the bungalow right after the mong coos happily and giggles. 

The commander fingers him, as she has everyone else, but he speaks anyway.

“That bastard is in the southern hills!  He squats at Botto’s farm, among the hens and heifers!  He is just shooting freely, now, striking tallies.  Just another night!  He is felling timber.  It is a rote job for him!”

The commander leaps to her feet and sweeps us out, as an impatient aunty would, before closing the door in our faces.  Someone knocks, I forget who.  

She said, “Not now.”

I am picturing the commander and my mother in the same body, my memory bullets hounding a belligerent, two headed ogre.  They are dismissing me in two different, but also similar, senses.  

Something sharp nips my arm, and my eyes are going very wide.  I look for the pincher, and it is the witchdoctor.  He is rubbing something in my arm, and just rubbing it for effect.  He is nodding knowingly.  

The night is glowing because of the moon and nearer bodies that are equally pocked.  

We mount up, employing cavalry doctorin’.  The clop of plastic sandals echoes in movieplex surround sound.  The bookworm commander is in a pickup truck.  Coward.  Her headlamps are the biggest moth bait I have ever seen.  Hypocrite.  On the other hand, the light dances behind us, allowing Shadow Puppet Hour, finally (!), with conditions.  Mother.

The conditions in the bush between here and the “there” we need to get to are not “nothing.”  We stumble into resistance fighters.  We crush them with little cost, but a little goes a long way.  All eyes are teary as we envelop Botto’s farm.  Bloom in a video game that can be turned down, but not off.  

Shots are crying out also.  They are becoming more intense, full on ugly tantrums, as we close in.  

The commander is shouting into a radio, sweat on her brow.  

We breathe heavy or not at all behind trees, underneath or inside of stumps, rifles clutched.

Ann is telling me, “I love you, I swear to the Creator,” because there are no atheists in foxholes, and we do not use foxholes anyway seeing as how we’re cavalry.  

Soon enough, mortars are giving their familiar pouty growls, followed by structures being knocked down.  At some point, Botto’s silo is leaning to the side, the tower of “I wish it was pizza.”  

There is movement in front of us and the commander’s Jeep lunges forward.

Fleeing on shaky legs, without the discipline or strength of We, is a figure in a folded blue hat.  Time, made footloose by the brown-brown, closes the distance between us and him.  We are deep into the o’dark when the commander’s revolver makes him kneel.

His rifle is the biggest I have yet seen.  It has electronics and wand-like implements for transmitting math problems to djinns.  Nissa and Josh are instructed to move it, and this proves difficult because of the thing’s size and their extreme curiosity.  

The sniper is an old one.  His gray stubble and toothbrushy mustache matches the gray in the commander’s hair.  

“The world turns,” the old man says as he is tossed against a tree, limp, by two regulars.  

“Is that philosophy, or ballistics math?” queries the commander, sliding her gun into his open mouth.

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.  Some of it gets on me and Ann.  She makes a Mr. Yuck face.

Josh allows me the credit for finding the sniper.  A light-up Spongebob medallion is pinned onto me (batteries included).  Everyone is really jello, like there is Cosby in their behinds.  

“I had the same thinking!  You are just lucky!”

Am I?

“You are just trying to kiss up to that bitch of a commander!”

Am I?

“You little faggot, you are such a faggot because of your eagle eyes!”

Am I?

April 20th.  

My imaginary friend, Boddahk, is between me and my rifle.  It is Tuesday, inspection day eve, and I am supposed to be cleaning it.  

Boddahk is a girl in a Nirvana t shirt with high cheekbones.  

Instead of stripping my rifle, I am stripping Boddahk, pulling her t shirt up forcefully, saying “Where is your uncle, where are your father and brother keeping themselves?”  

She resists, so I strike her, then start into her lower parts.  Older ones from my camp, and some with no place to go, are passing by.  Some give me smiles.  Some have no cognizant expression.  Their eyes all stare through Boddahk and her struggle.  

Soon enough, Josh is ringing my ears saying, “You are too old for such foolishness!  Where is your rifle, have you cleaned it?”

We are having a debate.  He says that Boddahk is an unnecessary distraction for me.  She exists only in my head, he reminds me.  

I remind him of cavalry doctorin’.  I am quoting the finer points of the Big One’s sermons—heads and what can fit in them, explaining that he is also in my head, and so he shares a space with Boddahk.  He is caught out, a regiment of foot on an open plain where there is little cover.  

Josh signals for the witchdoctor, a most senior, venerable older one, to come over.  He obliges.

Before the witchdoctor sits, he grabs my weapon and starts to field strip it.  He is sticking the bolt into one ear as he parts his ceremonial robes to squat, listening to its stories as he arbitrates for us.  

The witchdoctor asks me, “But would you die for her, this Boddahk?”  

I say, “Yes, and I would kill anyone, even myself, for her.” because I am playing with Josh and with Boddahk and with the witchdoctor, but only the witchdoctor and Boddahk are knowing of this.  

Boddahk starts creeping off, believing my hard posture has been compromised by our spirited argumentation.

Josh knows he is beaten and throws up his arms.

“This Western Romeo & Juliet fantasy!  You are too rebellious!”

“But we are all rebels,” I say, confused.  I feel my temperature rising.

“She is getting away!” the witchdoctor says, throwing me my rifle.  It’s clean.  

I take a firing position and eject slugs from my mind.  They crawl down my face into the rifle’s chamber and fling themselves at Boddahk until she is not moving.

I stand to salute the witchdoctor, but he has already gone.

September 14th.

At this moment, I am not having fun.  That is because this office is no place for violence, or fun, not ever.  These words are not mine, but those of the UNICEF woman who has crawled into my head to inspect its contents.  

I am engaged in music therapy, because I am very foolish.  It was my loose mouth that let slip the facts about us stealing the Big One’s Spotify Premium account.  It is my feeling that We will now receive second punishments.  

The first and greatest punishment has been a process called “de-mobilization”, during which we have been made to remain without rifles in this hostile pastel and gray terrain.  We must remain here, and sit, without truth or viable intelligence about the next objective.

To limit a cavalry’s maneuvering is to limit its usefulness.  Idle cavalry are dead.  

My musician for the day is performing on a ukelele.  It is a small guitar made smaller by the bloated woman playing it.  

But her chords are not those that play in my mind, something she must recognize since she is in my head loitering, and reconnoitering.  

My memories have the sound of 762 being shot into persons.  The striking of the body, the inside ballet of the tumbling round, which is a finicky dance partner to bones, muscles and soft tissue. 

I imagine those kids in the 99th, the first regiment to lay arms down to blue hats.  The Big One sent spies after them, and our troops brought a great many back from the brink of motionless boredom.  

The rest were at the camp when We set fire to the grasses, and this fire leaped up, like this, like this, until it was hanging off everything there, making them colder but also warmer.  And the virtuoso is telling me not to move, but the fire in my head is making me, and her now as well.  

My memories have the sound of crackling, and former cavalry instruments squeaking useless in a field, hollowed out, sitting like parked cars in a riot while fire eats even bones (greedy fire).  

The chords repeat endlessly.  

I am repeating myself: I am not having fun!

The musician snatches me into a bear hug and we are dance-tumbling down some stairs.  Her grasp is motherly, suffocating.  I lay prone on the landing.    

I sink into the ground and eventually skeletonize, demoted to infantry.

August 29th.

While doing tetris on a row of skeleton-candidates inside a hole we have dug, Cojak and Ann start griping about The Big One’s playlist again.  Saying, “We are hearing nothing but the same 44 songs in our heads 24 hours a day, and we cannot even count to 44, or 24!”

I tell Ann that if not for her lackluster hacking, we would have never been cursed.  She counters, saying if not for my desire to have background sounds all the time, we would have never achieved the idea of stealing a Spotify Premium account.  The world counters with the cadence of gunfire, people running, birds and bees, and a buzzing botfly wiggling its way into my ear.  

Cojak is continuing to dig and disappear rows, but has an idea.

He wonders what if we are using our shovels to dig to China, the country of impenetrable walls, porcelain, and Siamese cats who are being themselves whether you please or don’t.  

We ask only the most pertinent questions.

How long will this take?  That sounds boring?  You are a faggot?  Why China?

Cojak answers only the last, but looks deflated and sad while doing so.

“China is an authoritarian steak,” he says, “It is not having many of the freedoms We, under The Big One experience.  But also, it does not have Spotify.”

If the promise of steak were not enough to rouse me and Ann, the idea of no Spotify was a seal to this deal, for how could the Big One execute the particulars of her curse without a Spotify.exe?

We start digging harder, leaving the village elders in a state of abject candidacy.  They can wait.

It is said by many learned men that this world is flat.  Other, less reputable scientists say it is oval, which, by its root word of Ovaltine, must mean ‘full of chocolate’.  

We decide to assume a super position of these two, digging East and downward, but also eating dirt while we do so.  We are bellyfull on chocolate dust when we breach Agartha and fall into the underground ocean.  

Cojak and Ann are scared, because there is a low amount of light here.  Luckily, I have matches (and cigarettes, which we smoke after swimming to shore).

In time, the pirates arrive and take us aboard their dinghy.  We immobilize a larger vessel with our RPG launcher, then fire grappling hooks to close the distance.  The ship is a big Agarthaan cruise liner made of singing moss.  The Captain is nice and gives us tea, because he knows he will die soon and wants to attone somewhat for a dandy life of gay doings and passive cruelty.  We shoot him after Ann toasts his health (along with an improvised cigarette full of the boat moss).  

Cojak is worried that we have dallied too long.

“Command will have our hindparts!” he exclaims.

But Ann and I are concerned about more pressing matters: which way to China from here?

A memory strikes me like a dinosaur comet:  Boddahk, my imaginary friend, is Chinese.  I proudly announce this.

“But is she from China?”  asks Cojak.

“What a stupid question that is!” Ann says, flailing angrily to slap Cojak’s hat off, “He just said she is Chinese!” 

As usual, Boddahk is loath to talk.  We have ways of making her: her tongue, her fingernails, her parts.

Cojak is nervous, as the Agarthaans have progressive laws regarding torture.  We quickly take the information we need from Boddahk—GPS coordinates—then shoot her, and hastily re-bury her in my head.  

We climb through underground mountains of big rocks and candy and short-handled shovels.  

It is noontime, in the Eastern hours, when we emerge in Shangri-La.  

Chinese dragons.  Chopsticks.  Strange hats.

Silence!  

For the rest of this day, we exist as the three dots above characters from the Japanese game Xenogears.  

We are subject to no rewinds, pauses, or awkward 'song radio' detours.

It is all play, and the tracks are our own.  

For Garth

September 11th.

One of the experiences that causes me much bone rattling and shaking and puppy-dog trembling is beholding magicians in the midst of their job description: that is, bewitching things to the point of visible, audible enchantment.  

Sorcery, at its root, is like standing between a rocking band and a rapping one, eyes darting between the black and white, while your body is gyrated by bass and electrified by the rifts of devil gui-tar.  

On this individual night, the witchdoctor is asking for volunteers.  A renegade sorcerer has been caught digging up the graveyard of this fallen city.  This is obviously not to be allowed: there are rumored to be albinos buried there, so to do this is to weaken our witch-readiness.  This is obviously not be to aloud: I’m have peed on myself while raising my hand.  

I am not volunteering, for I am not an activist or communard.  This is contract work that, between you, me, and the witchdoctor, could yield good reward.

“If we are holding her, this sorcerer, for more than one month’s time, you can have some of her flow,” the witchdoctor has been telling me, “Also, I will spot you a soccer ball for your efforts.”  

The natural juices of women, I am assured, are vital and dangerous.  A bastard who was dirty once talked of wicked women putting these into stew.  An enchanted stew is something I would savor.  Any stew, really.  

We move on this sorcerer after the checkpoints have been set up in the hills.  We plod towards her crypt haven with fearful courage.  We destroy all stoplights, for it is rumored that the uncanny magnetism of albino bones can change their readings, and we do not want to send mixed signals.

The graveyard is dark, and rebellious shadows juke our flashlights.  We are focused on subduing them, but the witchdoctor says, “Stay ready.”

Someone says “Movement!” and I am training my rifle as if it were a dragon.  The witchdoctor’s hand pushes the barrel towards the dirt, and his other one goes to his lips.  Shhh.  

But he has only two hands.  

Fire is let loose.  Hell follows with it: we are reprimanded for our “twitch response.”  

“But ‘twitch’ is something you cannot spell without ‘witch’,“ is what Nissa is arguing defensively.  I’ll take her word for it.  The witchdoctor uncrooks the curvature of his posture to slap her upside the head, then crouches over the corpse of the sorcerer, who has played tag and lost against many 762’s.  

Her lips are blackened.  She wears checkered trousers and netted leggings.  Like a soundcloud rapper, her flow ability is in question.

The game of soccer looks more beautiful than ever.  

November 13th.

Within the magic of a song is its ability to transport you to someplace else.

Today, We are very much in the nethers of an elsewhere.  We emerged early this morning in rain, with Josh the commander wading through confused apologetics from our two scouts, who were Corrine and John-Paul.  Past tense.  

Corrine and John-Paul’s retirement works out for us.  We are promoted to taking point.

After the two of us receive our pink scout recon badges (Bedazzled and glittering, just as We are), We forge ahead through the wilderness.  We find a highway to the north and follow it diligently while others creep behind in the side gullies and brush.  

Our promotion has come with additional kit: a skateboard and two pairs of basketball shoes that feel like tap dancing on cotton.  “Kit” may be a misnomer.  “Commandeered grave goods” is probably better, though “personal FX” works best, I believe.  

We glide across the asphalt, levitating.   

A large green sign protests our march, so We fill it with holes before Nissa tells everyone to stop.

She can read it.  

“York!” she cries out, running her fingers over the white patches that have not been completely aerated by 762.

Josh is making a face.  The word “dork” is so big in his head that I can see it from here, though he is not saying as much due to his unexpressed affections towards Nissa.  A dork is the part of whales used for domesticating their females.  I doubt he will domesticate Nissa, unless it is with a stack of books or something heavier.  

Ann spies a great camp on a mountain.  It is a foreboding structure that mimics the pines around it, with a roof of green and large awnings.

Its position on the mountaintop means that the high breezes disperse its weird vibes onto us, Josh indicates.  He says We must destroy it.  Nissa disagrees, saying it is an asset to be studied.  Josh is gesturing at a passage in the Field Manual (which he claims to have read), and Nissa is reading from it: 

“FLARE. The flare is a chemically charged shell that, when fired by a dwarven mortar team, can reveal areas and enemies that are difficult to see, or otherwise cloaked by invisibility or Shadowmeld.”

Nissa looks surprised.  Josh folds his arms over his chest, nodding like Mussolini, the hidden character in Mario.

The commanduh orders the mortar team forward.  

“We will gain valuable intelligence from this.” Josh assures everyone.  

Nissa just smiles.  

To our surprise, however, shots ring out, which, like the little girl emerging from the TV at 3 AM, scares the shit out of everybody.  

One mortar man has sprung a leak.  I start to rip my shirt, but the medic has already applied at least 3 BAND-AIDS.

Someone says “Carry this ammo to the treeline,” so I do.

It is me and Ann settled snugly in a ditch.  Nissa is directing our fire at one of the turrets on the building, occasionally adjusting our rifle glyphs and saying things like “120 meters” or “200 meters” while we laugh and shoot.  

Nissa’s gun has a laser pointer strategically appended to it with masking tape.  Her bullets obey commands tirelessly, zug zug.  

Our power is overwhelming, so We win.  We are up the mountain faster than a speeding faggot running in tights that also run.  

“Show your hands!” We insist.

It is a motley crew that has opposed us, but they’re mostly our age so it’s all fair.  They are led out one by one, and asked to give names so that Nissa can create good markers.  We afford them this because they fought well.

“Kaufman,” one says.  Josh coughs for effect.  No one laughs, so he does it again.  Then people do.  

“Bergman,” says another, presumably the NCO of the cooks.

“Newman,” a particularly diminutive one says.  He looks heartbroken.  

“Fucking new guy!” half of our squad yells, tearing up with glee.  

“You are Oldman today, friend.”  He is patted magnanimously on the shoulder, then around the waist, where a sidearm is discovered, then his tennis shoes are slipped off, then he is beaten.

A graying, short-statured officer locks eyes with Josh and says “Siegel” quietly.  

“It seems they are out of mans,” Josh chortles conspicuously, “Is that like the bird?”

“It’s like your fucking mom, ya little prick,” he responds, smirking.

Josh quickdraws his revolver like he is in a Wild West movie and there is a credible threat to his existence. Both of these are untrue currently, but the song is changing soon.  

They stare each other down.

This bird is blowing a raspberry with his lips as Josh cracks open his revolver.  I could stick a peace sign into the empty bullet rooms, like I am the Stooges blinding parallel worlds.

“If you win, bird, you, your men fly, go.” Josh gestures, “If I win, I am the one who is flying.  We go.”

Josh spins the chamber and puts the gun to his own head.  He pulls the trigger.

It feels like the planet is spinning counter to us, in spite.

Josh survives to spin again, then hands the weapon to the Seagull.

When he brings the weapon to his wrinkly temple and fires, his gray-white particulates are thrown like dirty silverware against the front of the building.  Co-baing!

Someone cries out.  

Nissa’s jaw is on the ground when Josh saunters over.  Trace amounts of disappointment hamper his gait.

“Today, I am not Superman.”

January 14th.

The Scrolls of Doom are what the Big One has now bound this world with.  It was more like hogtying than binding.  And in broad daylight, not in the darkness, like when the last guy tried it.

Doom is algo-rhythmic, which means it is like, taking into account the average heartbeat and pulse of life.  This is why the Big One has control over all life, because She is always playing the rhythm of the moment.  All moments are now recorded, so it is easy to remix and shuffle them.  This is why the last guy failed: the technology to record moments did not yet exist when he set his armies on the march, so he had to reproduce them through memory.  

Our fate is sealed in the Scrolls.  It can be seen on most devices with a swipe.  The Scrolls are mostly infinite, and you can see yourself and your friends and strangers there.  

For example, We, in a foolish gamble to get unlimited music (sorry!), used a trick from a stranger who roamed the Scrolls under a cloak of obscurity.  It was not me who orchestrated this, it was Ann.  Honestly.  The stranger bid us to do an exchange of cookies, or some devilment, which should have gotten us free Spotify.  I do not know the exactments.  I should not have gone along with a plan to accept sweets from strangers.

Anyway, it is a pastime of most nights to be viewing the Scrolls.  Some old ones, men from an age when the magic binding was done with yarn instead of zip ties, regularly accost me for my love of, say, pouring over the Scrolls for visions of cute animals.

“Are you a faggot?” they ask me. 

“You could be staring into the void of girls,” they assure me.

“You could be playing soccer, something real, vital,” they tell me while gripping my shoulder hard.

“You should give us that device, my love” they beg me, foaming, “Give us that!”

I have seen my death in the Scrolls, forecast by pictures of those who look like me.  I have wished death on others through my proclamations there, such as that time when a political officer bid me tell the device half-truths about our readiness to bolster morale.

“I am coming to kill you,” I said, snickering until a strong backhand corrected my posture, “I am coming to where you live, to kill you.”

August 19th.

Contact.  

Words and intonations are now hitting danger close to our point of engagement.  Friendly fire has taken some of my comrades, but not me.  

Regardless, this field is lost, a secret dungeon in Harvest Moon where you are being convinced that extra work is fun because your friends may not have unlocked it yet.

Our cavalry has been cut apart.  There is here just four of us.  Ann.  Corrine.  Dredge.  Myself.

Four is a number I know intimately, because the woman with the red shirt has instilled it inside me by saying “The FOUR of you are here” to the point of upchuck.  I am struck (repeatedly) by her cadence.  My body is weeping shards of four.  

There is writing on a board.  There is writing on a paper near me.  I am drawing the word of the day from the board.  First semi-consciously, tracing shapes, then fully automatic.  Tuned out, dropped in, war fog.  

The word is “BIRD.”

I know not because I have read it.  I cannot.  

Bird is like a chick in the odes to red dirt that jingle in the West.  My eyes and fingers follow its shapes, but its letters, they are jerking me around, mostly.

The bird is the word.  The word is bird.  

Here is bird in a sentence.  Bird penitentiary.  Here is bird used with other words I cannot spell out.  Here is bird on a surf board, drawn between yawns and long faces and bad feelings to stretch out the torture.

At some point, another is coming in.  Some kid I don’t recognize.  Now four is a dead name.  We are FIVE.

I put my head down.  The teacher is asking me to spell out ‘bird’.

I can’t.  She is tormenting me with this fact.

“Don’t you know?” becomes her inquisition.  Shame is hot, like on that medieval TV show.

Soon, there is another adult here.  She is a skeleton without the tactical usefulness of one.  A pretty corpse or an ugly social worker.

She is fishing for obedience, “Are you making trouble?”  I bite.  Her.
  
Many adults are in and out of this room.  They are outside of the numbers, an endless set, while I am on their stage performing one.  White lights.  Heckling.  “Open your mouth.” 

A confused dove hits the window outside.  

March 15th.

One of the funniest types of simps in our company is the leyman.  Leymen are toadies for the book-sniffing acolytes who got their start at the Big One’s Scholarmance, which is an apex predator similar to the K-12 child-eater, but one that preys only on adults.  

I was a leyman for about a fortnight before I decided that shooting is better than building.  

It is a stupid job.

Mostly, you drag lengths of yarn behind the acolyte while they mumble and listen to nothing but the sound of the arcane on repeat like it is Tierra Whack’s 15-minute album.  There are lines far beneath the earth that they are hearing, somehow, and these produce magic for increasing our witch-readiness.  The yarn is for redirecting these lines.  To use it skillfully is like diverting rivers and streams, but without the honesty of manual work.  

The upside to being a leyman is that you are always hearing the Big One’s voice.  She is many evenings in a three-way call with the planet, Creator and Her own person.  I listened as I untangled threads, and sometimes felt She spoke to me and me alone.  She would say things like, “I am sending many good soldiers to you soon, my best”, or “We will be needing an overload in Sector 314, grid coordinates 3-scry, 46 and 2,” or, “I wish you would come here and strike me down.”  

The last one in particular rode in my head, which, in my younger days, was mostly a freight hauler that any vagrant could hop.  The Big One is like that Roger Miller hobo.  She is knowing of all the children, their true selves, and is adept at entering uninvited.  

It was my pleasuring to stage many nighttime head-plays where She was a main character.  She struck me, I struck Her.  It was pinball, parts of my head lighting up.  Pinball, and when it came time to be putting my initials into the machine, I would always mash the buttons with blinding speed.  In the end, I was usually the Zoro mark three times over.  Then, the black of reset.    

I tire of recounting the past.   

The acolyte discharged me after he found out I could not read or write.  

I was disappointed.  

Today, I am riding in the commander’s flag truck.  She is at the wheel speaking softly.  

We are passing through the area where a great rout has happened, with our forces scattered to the winds by blue and black helmets.  

There is here a leyman hanging off the barbed wire, skull exposed.

I smile, fucking simp.

July 29th.

One thing that is known about the Young and Rich Nation is that there are in it many wonders of metal and coltan, each possessing sorcerous powers.

I am now three nights guarding the High Command’s bunker in a cave outside of Atlantis, an important beehive of the Nation that is filled mostly with black and yellow.  

Black is the color of its hearts, and yellow its minds, I am told.  

It was my understanding (from playing cards) that hearts are red or read, but I am no anatomist.  When the witchdoctor read my cards, he pulled the Ace of Spades and said “eventful happenings,” which I paid no mind to until I witnessed one of our advance units become like corn in a field, parting harmlessly around ghosts who would not die.  

Yellow is the color of my mind when I am considering whether or not to shoot longer than I consider which cracks to step on.

Red, or infrared is the color of the drone’s eye, which sees things before We can.  I am seeing red, because I am looking through the eyes of a drone, here in the hallway outside of the room where friends with better KDAs direct our flying craft using light-up Playstation paddles.  

Play has no limits™

FOMO rises.  

I enter the drone hovel to ask a question.  There is an officer in blue directing the soldiers, most of them repurposed cavalry, like me.  I see Nissa and nod to her.  She is lit by controller light, veins bulging, and looks like waif/wife material.

I am seeing into her 50 inch 4k screen.  It’s beautiful.  The image is upside down.  Her thin fingers twitch and it is righted.  The image pixellates.  Big rockets appear and spiral into the distance (did she fire them?).

“Can I help you?” asks Officer Blue, whose kit and bleached bones betray him as one of the Young and Rich who betrayed them (in death) to join The Big One’s ranks.  

No, is not my answer—I say nothing and stare at the screen—’no’ is the answer to the rocket question.  They are not Nissa’s.  More are emerging from behind her craft, and I realize, as the view banks downward sharply, that she is dodging them.  

She is being chased.  A dogfight (!) above the sunken city where men fight dogs for scraps or less.  

White is the color of ordinance falling on the persons hustling below.  

Nissa’s drone is speeding down the highway.  It is Star Wars, the Death Star scene, and death is still the star.  On other screens, death is stealing the show, chewing the scenery.  

Here is one of our craft firing on a filling station. 

Here is one strafing a family in an empty city square.

Here is several burial orderlies making a trench run, with an explosive payoff [TARGET DESTROYED].  

Here is a mostly-blank screen, a blue, shiny mirror with a question that my inability to read makes ominous (???).

The skeletal officer is blue, ah-ba-dee-ah-ba-die.  If his face had skin, he would be blue in it, yelling orders at me.  He is blue because he is a coward, but that is by design.  I know the ways of skeletons.  A ranker of flesh and blood must give him orders.  Unmanned, he is shiftless, a scarecrow, a videogame tutorial.  He will not move against me.  

“You’re acting above your paygrade, being in here,” he screeches.  The room shakes with incoming, disturbing some dirt clods.

A finger-twiddler at the console nearest to my person looks at me with disgust, the kind of look one gives to a friend who doesn’t know the level.  “Grow up,” he sasses.

Growth is above my paygrade. 

July 9th.

I am dead now, restless from improper burial and my place on the attention-deficit spectrum.  The place where my ghost has wound up is a basement, a short distance from my body, which has been covered by the owners of this villa with plaster and pieces of wet sheetrock.

It was an incursion into the outskirts of the Great and Powerful District, Gates Ward, that brought me to slumbering.  

Orders said that we were to enter this villa, which looks like something that might be remodeled by the Bob with a similar-sounding “V” name.  We were supposed to bivouac here until other units could make the march to G&P, massing to bring its final artillery guns into submission.

But it is said that laid plans are mice, comfortably devouring food in the cupboard until the day they are scattered by a dieoff or a crafty exterminator. And surely have we licked the green, poisonous bait with this operation.

Our campsite was defended by a handful of partisans, who we chased away with bullets.  They reformed in desperation, like so many swords, then set upon our position while we were doing a sleepover in the living room, tents and videogames and everything.

In a day they had retaken their home as if the narrative of combat was a Christmastime story about a family outwitting the evil bank, with our summary executions being the tearjerker climax.

My papier-mâché grave is next to Anne’s.  She liked doing arts and crafts, so I am happy for her.  

It is nice, since I will admit that I was wanting her company in life (maybe not always).  But I have not seen her here.  It is my understanding, from things the witchdoctor has said, and my time in online videogames, that the afterlife is instanced.  This space was dynamically created for me and up to three other besties, which I guess are “Myself”, “I”, and the Creator (who must have a space in everything).

The partisans move constantly.  I hear them on their radios wielding grid against our advancing troops.  The guns on the far hill are shrieking always.  Mortars are daily falling out of the sky like wayward cosmic bodies, and every friendly tank destroyed is met with a “WorldStar!”

Their feet are ragged claws scuttling across the floors of seas that won’t shut the fuck up, like the war-voyeur in that movie who is constantly angering the bald mafia Colonel.

They seem unaware of me.  I have tried to go upstairs and the door is locked.  I have tried passing through the door, but cannot cross its threshold.  

It is very dark down here.

Every day the steady gunfire outside is closer, which means we must be winning.  G&P folks are technocrats and house hiders who would sooner dronefag our forces than engage them in the open field.

Every day in this basement, I engage in Infinite Warfare of the spiritual variety (Prestige Level 30), talking to myself, and I, and Me, and occasionally Creator.  I also engage in psyops, singing preternationalistic hymns to the enemy.  “You’ll fire your musket, but I’ll run you through.”

Every day I wish my mummifying body would become Undertaker, sit up, walk out through those Bilco doors, go to the garden, and evict deceased partisans from the better post-life real estate—just as our cavalry temporarily ousted them from the warmth of this villa.

I just want a little rest.  I want the red earth that is woven with rocks and enemy shells as armor for sleep.  I want prime dirt for me and Anne.  

We want skeletonization so that we can answer The Big One’s post-life call of duty in an acceptable tone, not with “Just a minute, Mom!”

November 13th.

There are many cities yet to fall in the lower parts of the Young Rich Nation.  During recent nights, we are outside of a place called Nashville, watching as the lights of buildings turn off like glowing dominoes being knocked over by the Creator.  This city, named for the gnashing of teeth, is a war production hub and "strategically necessary", which means that is a place where We will have to die or at least lose fingers.  Looking on the bright side, we will not lose them to the cold.  It is very warm here.

Nashville contributes a resource called "stadium country" to the war effort of the Remainder, the name the generals give to people and structures that we can shoot at without being punished.  

Epidemic to this area are the skeleton soldiers of Q company, "Long Division" as they are known to us since they are, as skeletons tend to be, forever animated.  They mostly move when ordered to or play possum in the streets while waiting for partisans to step on them.

This morning, the rattle of bones and sabers is intense as Milton, the local political officer, is setting femurs and hip bones into motion.  They are marching into a building and bringing out woman after woman, and occasionally a man.  

We are viewing this from the rooftops, providing overwatch and peanuts from the gallery.  Josh is saying they are all part of a spy ring.  I ask if that is like a Ring Pop and he says "Yes, with more choking hazard."  Nissa uses my joke as an opportunity to give a boring explanation of how spies choke the life out of our war effort.  

“There are 8 of them,” Nissa says, counting.  “8, plus the leader.”

Josh tries to follow along on his hands, but doesn’t have enough digits.

One of the women—the one with black dripping from her eyes—has a ringing phone.  Milton removes it from the pocket of her jeans, looks at the call id, then smashes it and yells something to the skeletons.  They enter the building again and haul out two big cabinets.  

Milton tucks his lighter into the utility pocket of the woman’s white t-shirt and says, "Light my cigarette."  She looks at him.  He repeats his command.  She is trembling and is still reaching for Creator with her hands up, don't shoot.  "You can put your hands down," Milton says smirking.  A skeleton laughs, which sounds like really uncomfortable silence.  

She holds the lighter to the cig, clicks it, then immediately drops it.  

Milton cracks up.

“It must be a trick lighter,” Nissa says with a clap and a laugh, “It has given her skin a tingle.”

As she is picking it up, Milton puts his boot into her head.  A nearby skeleton fires a taser, and the alligator clips bite her arm.  Chomp.  She is dancing now.

Thunder is rolling in, and I feel wet on my leg and other places.  

Milton begins to laugh like he is insane.  He is laughing between increasingly powerful coughs, ahem ahems are turning into guttural ahuum agh ahuums.  He clutches his arm and mumbles “Brace me” to a skele.  It obeys.

The woman dances still, although her bladder is letting go.  The gathered up partisans start pointing to each other frantically.  Some weep and point at their leader, then at the building.

Everyone has somewhat concerned looks, but Nissa is smiling.

“Time for a number 8 riddle,” Nissa chuckles, jostling my ribs.  

“What is 8 divided by 1?”

Josh crosses his fingers trying to figure it out until he is cross-eyed, and just cross.

I shrug.

“Still 8,” Nissa says, “But it divides cleanly.  No remainder.”

November 22nd.

It is today that will live in infamy, for it is the day where all witchdoctors and witchlawyers are having a seance with the souls of the dead.  They are trying to decide which witch will come to be the ruler over the skeletons in this area.

Skeletons are useful, but they are also stupid.  If I were an animal in the ocean, floating between meals and not really doing much of anything, I would not need a skeleton.  Skeletons need muscle to do their work.  Whether it is my muscle or the strength of sorcery directing a bone to move is irrelevant.  Boypower and girlpower are the same as magic power, in that way.  

All power is inferior to the power of the Big One, however.

In these days in which we are nearest to victory, sorcerers like the witchdoctor are muscles in the Big One’s body, moving her bones around so that her mind can do other tasks.  They are the solidity giving tension in her pants, like the lyrics from that song about a peeping tom by those Western boys who flee fall out.  

But the spirit world, where witchpower comes from, is a democracy, a Western farce.  This is why it is often said that the spirits are “tricksters,” I guess.  The spirits must choose the witchdoctor who is most fit to lead.

Due to this, there is—once every crescent moon—the need to meet, greet, and bribe the spirits into favor.  This is all sorcerer politics, gibberish to me.  I know of only one fact: Among his peers, our witchdoctor is known as "Mirv," which is a piece of ordinance that can bring great suffering but also relief.  This name conjures fear and respect.  It is a short name that buzzes your teeth when you say it.  It is apparently a name that rests nicely on a sign (something I cannot say for sure, as I am not in the business of reading signs, or anything else).  

Nissa is now in the business of creating signs for the witchdoctor’s “campaign,” a word that has previously only held meaning to me when used like “We must be in the bush soon, we are on campaign” or “Only a faggot plays campaign, multiplayer is where the prestige is!”

The witchdoctor is campaigning against adversaries—other witches, mostly, and some pretenders who believe that the way they carry a big stick makes them eligible to command magics.  

Josh is today joking with me about a woman, one of the crook-waving pretenders mentioned, who now sits buried up to her neck in red dirt near the center of camp.  She has been many hours and countless minutes saying “Mirv is a non-factor, a nothing man, nowhere man.  All of his doings are lies, sleights of hand.  Purest applesauce.”  Even now as the ground hugs her body, she bellows on by night and by day.  She is a crone from a far away camp, an invasive weed now planted among us.  I know very little about her.

It is said that her underhanded attempts to use weapons of steel (foolish) against the witchdoctor’s person were quickly put down by his staff.  Here the meaning of staff is duplicitous, but I believe mostly that he gave her thick head a rapping, foiling her plans as if they were shiny cardboard depictions of fake wizards.  

I have made it a point to spit in this woman’s mouth every time I can.  

The witchdoctor’s campaign incantation is “Shoot me,” repeated four times, and he has made it very clear that he will use our skeletons to the best of his ability if he is favored by the spirits.  We are expecting him to win, as ghosts—similar to boys and girls—are easily dazzled by bravado and short bursts of repetition.

It is late into the night when I catch Ann tearfully praying for the witchdoctor’s success.  He hears her weeping and comes into the tent.  

Holding her hand in his, he does inspirational math that creates confidence and changes the tears to mostly joyful ones.  

He says, “Do like you are making a fist,” which she does in the best manner she can.

As he uncurls each of her fingers, he counts, smiling at her with his teeth, which are pointed and aligned like soldiers in the field, straighter than George.  Flickering between here and the spirit realm, he says, “One and one and one is three.”  He's got to be good looking, because he's so hard to see.

November 21st.

It is with much sadness (and too much gain) that the masters of the Young Rich Nation announce the fall of Nashville on their speaker systems.  Our applause is thunderous.  Thunderstorms come from the north, following boy and girl soldiers like cosmetic pets in an online Chinese skinner box.  

Speaking in terms of gains, ours are very great.  We have done much clipping and trimming of heads from bodies.  Summary executions are on the rise again.  Summary:  Many who now live will be skeletonizing soon.  

The last forces of the enemy make for trains near the Great & Powerful Districts.  They are trying to export their wives and children to somewhere else, before we send them to the Elsewhere.  Their process is slow like a fraudulent internet bundler that is claiming to be as good as Adobe, and similar to the bricks that carry that namesake, they may soon find themselves stacked up in a freshly dug pit.

The trains go nowhere anyway.  Skeletons from Long Division have been at them with hammers and crowbars.  A train passing over such a rats nest of twisted metal will surely derail, sending its occupants to the next life in economy.

As some people see it, these are now the winter months of ‘65.  The end months of this siege.  The end for many Young Rich niggaz, who have lingered on a full year longer than the man in The Beatles jaunt, wondering if they are to be fed or abandoned.  

Within this city of Nashing teeth, where there is no real equilibrium except for the movie that Josh the Commander plays each night in his tent, I have beheld many flags of a nation that I recognize from more boring films.  In the Young Rich Nation’s backstory, as told by black and white images that put me to sleep, this flag was of a country called Dixie.  Dixie spent its short life being run into the dirt by those bigger, and in that respect it is similar to me, Ann, and Cortez.  It has been explained to me that it also received the benefits of freemium labor, where rich whales could purchase skins to please them.  

Dixie’s flag proudly reigns here, and our unit has made it an errand to retrieve many of these ancient standards because of their aesthetic qualities.  Nissa climbed a large obelisk in the center of town to get one for Josh, who is an awful coward with high places (he would not admit this). 

We rapidly advance in some direction.  

The places of the Yung Rich Nation’s hotbed will soon see the heat leave from them, like a carcass, like a very old universe.  I have seen Nashvillains and Georgics on their knees, working the earth like it has become a stripper pole.  It is dumb for me, but I hope that the process of skeletonization will be the last act of stripping these people endure.