ONE THOUSAND CUTS

Robert watched them slide by on the screen of his phone, talisman markers of a purer world. In Bloom. Man in the Box. Jesus Christ Pose. Breed. No Excuses. Black Hole Sun. But then something occurred to him as he looked for the perfect selection to block out the world and insulate him in his new gym adventure. Kurt Cobain had died in 1994. Layne Staley had died in 2002. Chris Cornell had died in 2017. He was filling his head with the voices of dead men. ‘Fuck,’ Robert thought, ‘when did I get so fucking old.’

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The alien ship hung in the air, glinting like an old chrome hub cab in the shafted light of the sun which arced above it like a vengeful phoenix. It was a round saucer shaped craft, with a large concave Plexiglas dome on the top. The words ‘unidentified flying object’ were painted upon the side of the craft, and inside they sat, the occupants, the aliens, like giant oozing balls of snot, they squelched inside their orbiting ship, consulting instruments with their many eyes as they curiously watched the strange little greeny-blue planet far below.

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“What if you could be the trigger, Robert. What if your rage, your anger, your frustration… what if the white hot power of your emotions is all that it needs to end… everything? What if all you had to do was sit in a chair, wire yourself in and activate a mechanism… to end it all forever. What if you could? And if you could… would you do it?”

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Like eager ants with bright shining eyes in the dark, the vehicles rush hither and thither on their night-time tasks, from who knows where to who knows what. On the hill in the cemetery they ignore such sounds, the noise of present day – they have come to listen for older voices, the whispers of the past.

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The enormity of it compared to an individual human existence made gazing at it akin to staring at the stars, but unlike the stars you could stand at its very edge and touch it. You could dip your feet into its waves while staring at the endless expanse beyond, squinting toward that point on the horizon where the azure ocean below somehow merged with the cerulean skies above, forming one never-ending sea.

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The sands of the endless desert shifted imperceptibility as the swirling gusts of the evening storms roiled once more across the vista. An endless expanse of nothingness lay in all possible directions, a landscape without landmarks, just the ever-changing dunes, grey in the light of the broken moon above.

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“Once we did not live in the cracks,” she whispered, “but under bright lights walking tall. There were forests and rivers and oceans, spaces larger than could be imagined. We could fly and race at incredible speeds and watch stories told on magic windows.”

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