I am wrapped in an aural cocoon in the belly of this giant silver intestine, hurtling along the track towards my destination with all the agonising slowness of a glacier. My heart thunders in my chest like a hummingbird the size of a helicopter. The anticipation! The choking power of my desire silences every competitor. My thoughts leaping one after the other from my mind, are scything through the dark night like spears forged of light.

My body is filled with longing. Desire inflates my muscles to the point of explosion. My skin screams for her touch and cries out memories of yesterday. Everywhere her hands have touched is swept with waves of needles. My fingers ache with emptiness. I shut my eyes and try to rein the stallion within, but am no match for the power of my love. The attempt is half-hearted, admittedly, because there is no true desire in me to slake the pull towards her, only to endure. To outlast circumstance, and prove fate. I clench my jaw; it seems as though my voracious skin will tear free of my flesh and go racing ahead to reach her more quickly.

It seems unfair, at times, to focus my powerful desire on her, to target this girl and unleash the unrestrained force of my heart on her. Like pouring the atomic fury of the sun into a single light bulb. I feel as though I would do just that, by placing my hand on hers, my lips to her lips, she would be consumed by the inferno I am stoking within. Even by merely locking my gaze, arcs of electric energy would burst forth from me to find purchase in her eyes. But hold my gaze she does, and my hands, and wrap me in her arms and draw me even closer. She accepts the challenge that is my love, and the fire that I bring.

Happiness ripples over my skin like cool waters of absolution. I smile as though I am already in her arms, the tide surging forward to spill from my eyes in tiny waves of infinite ecstasy.

I woke up, staring at a ceiling I felt I recognised. Only my eyes were awake, or so it seemed: I felt drained, depleted. My limbs were just so much meat laying on this bed I also found familiar. I blinked a few times very slowly, testing out the muscles in my face. They seemed to react normally, but it was hard to be sure. I remembered Serai then. She surfaced in my memory like a wraith stepping into the revealing glow of a streetlight. No memory in particular, just her.

Just as I was about to attempt speaking, my skin exploded into pins and needles. My entire body, not just one limb as one normally expects, but my whole system was suddenly electrified, stabbed at a million points with an itching tingling that would have driven me insane had it lasted more than the twenty seconds or so it did. Much to my relief, I found that my arms and legs felt reletively normal after that rush of discomfort. I curled my arms up around my chest, sliding my hands up and down. My skin was icy cold.

I began shivering quite violently then, a deep sort of racking shudder that erupted in waves from my stomach, and emanated out into my limbs and jaw. I curled into the fetal position, and held onto myself, begging silently for some warmth. I could tell, through my distraction, that the room wasn’t cold, it was definitely me. I was far, far below room temperature. As I moved, my joints protested with hot spots of pain and though it hurt, I welcomed the sensation of heat that seemed to spread out from my elbows, knees, knuckles as I worked them gingerly.

I felt so clinical, detatched, I was very aware of every sensation, but not perturbed in the slightest by it. I simply took each in turn, and tried the best method I could think of to relieve the problem. I could only guess that I’d been lying entirely motionless for quite some time, and my circulation had slowed to a crawl, which dropped my body temperature, played havoc on my nervous system, and caused my joints to stiffen beyond all usefulness. So there was nothing to do but warm up at a cautious pace, as to bring my systems back into normal working order. I couldn’t explain the calm I felt. Reflecting on the moment, I should by all rights have been screaming in terror from the moment I opened my eyes and couldn’t feel myself, but I never felt frightened.

"Hello Jarrod. Welcome back," Serai said as she entered the room. I rolled to my other side to bring her into my field of vision. I winced with the movement. Just the brush of fabric against my skin was painful. She approached, and sat beside me on the bed I now placed as hers, below the ceiling that also belonged to her. I sat up after inordinate effort, and replied.

I managed to croak out a harsh "Hi," in an unintentional sort of whisper. My throat was parched. She had anticipated this, and handed me a warm cup of tea. I took it, hoping that my fingers would behave. It seemed they were back to operating on that level of reliability at least. As I took my first sip of the tea, Serai placed a hand on my neck. Either the tea she’d brewed had some sort of supernatural qualities, or her touch did. I literally felt warmth rush through my body, through the skin and muscles and deeper. The pain slid away. The stiffness melted. I could breathe easier, and my throat was wet again.

"Hi," I said again, sounding much closer to normal.

"You’ve scared me twice now," she said.

"I’m sorry," I replied. It was only then that I remembered.

Doctor Thomason’s breath was slow, steady. It wasn’t time to get excited yet, there were still steps to be taken. He eased his SUV out into freeway traffic, though inside you would hardly know he had accellerated up to seventy miles per hour. The interior of the truck was a calm vacuum hurtling down the road towards the bayou. There was always a bayou at hand in the panhandle of Florida, and it would be a short trip for the Doctor and his passenger.

He didn’t know her name, what did the name matter anyway? She was slumped in the passenger seat, asleep until one peered closer and noticed her open eyes. They blinked occasionally, a spinal cord reflex curve that even the curare couldn’t entirely stop. Mostly curare handled big muscles, the ones we know we’re using, not the involuntary mechanisms like breathing, heartbeat, and blinking. It was an utterly perfect pair of handcuffs.

Thomason glanced at his companion briefly, and a thin smile flickered across his thin lips. He’d encountered the little tramp while volunteering at a free clinic only two months ago. Since then he’d invited her to meet him on a number of occasions, at the same clinic, where he provided some much-needed care, and also some much un-needed vicodin. Those were simply a pleasant bait and hook in one little bottle. Homeless girls rarely have the benefits of good health cover and the doctor treated her well. He gave her vaccines and vitamins, checked her blood for various conditions that could have been life-threatening. Ironically enough, she was healthier than a lot of Thomason’s more typical patients.

Healthier and far more delectable.

The swamp was off the freeway, at a rest-stop exit leading to a frontage road that ran about three miles straight off the map. He had to hurry so it wouldn’t be completely dark when they got there, but be equally careful in driving through the treacherous terrain. No time to get unduly excited yet, he thought.

Only a few more minutes put Thomason on the frontage road, and cruising through the isolation. The sun was just brushing the top of the scrub, as he approached the lowlands. His SUV slid into the wilder parts calmly. The doctor did not look at the girl anymore. This road grew less and less reliable as it drew farther from civilisation. There was nothing but swampy pools of water, massive moss-choked trees, and various forms of wildlife never any bigger than a shoe.

Finally, the doctor was standing beside his truck’s passenger door. He carefully opened it, ensuring the girl didn’t tumble out. She was effectively held in by the seatbelt, he noted, and so opened the door fully and stepped back. He just looked at her for a few minutes, finally letting the moment fill him with emotion. That thin smile creapt across his lips as he just stared at the girl, who couldn’t help but stare back. The doctor stepped forward, and reached across the girl, behind the driver’s seat and pulled out one of his medical bags and a blanket. He slung the bag on one shoulder, and the blanket over the other. Leaning back, he gently unfastened the seatbelt, and took the girl in his arms. Even her dead weight was that of a feather. She was so slight, so fragile, so beautiful that when he’d first seen her, he stared for simple pleasure. And now, she was in his arms, and he was approaching euphoria.

Ten minutes later she didn’t feel any heavier, but they were sufficiently off the beaten track as to make the doctor feel completely secluded. Every step was one away from servitude, imprisonment, and towards power and control. He wasn’t walking across a swamp, no, he was climbing Mount Olympus. Ascending to heaven to reclaim his position of godly powers. He laid the girl down on top of the blanket and stood over her, just looking, just absorbing the beauty that was her flesh and blood, skin and bone. Still staring, never taking his eyes from some part of her body or another, he stripped.

Standing there in the waning sunlight, the doctor peered past his ever-expanding paunch, and waited for his erection grow until it extended far enough to see. On her back, the girl had no choice but to witness the birth of the doctor’s hard-on with him. Kneeling beside her prone body, the doctor moved his hands just above her, not quite willing to break the trance of anticipation yet. It seemed his hands were motionless at times; it took several minutes for him to progress from her throat to breasts to stomach and back again. It was as if he could feel her presence in the ether surrounding her body, as if not touching her was the first step in touching her. Connecting to her. Controlling her.

After nearly a quarter of an hour, Thomason extracted a pair of medical scissors from his black bag and began cutting from the bottom of her baggy T-shirt, upwards. Now his breathing was somewhat more ragged, but his years of medical training sprang up like a circus safety net to guide his hands. The cut was straight, and her breasts were his. Clenching his stomach to control the excitement, the doctor turned his attention to her tattered sweatpants. These he cut twice, once from the waistband all the way down each leg. He set his scissors down, and savoured the moment. There was nothing but his own hand, reaching and lifting, between him and her cunt. He just stared at her crotch for a while, letting his eyes want it just that much more. The swamp was swathed in silence. The same hush filled an auditorium in the half second before the symphony starts- as comfortable as a starched tuxedo shirt.

Thomason ran his fingers over her skin until the moon was high enough to illuminate them both in a ghostly phosphoresance. The hair on his back and stomach lit up an angelic halo around him. He hadn’t let himself touch any more than her nipples, waiting for the transition from twilight to night to become complete. When he did let his fingertips caress the soft folds of skin between her legs, Thomason had to suck in a sharp breath and clench every muscle from his stomach down to keep from ejaculating. He held his hand there, motionless, riding the crest of an orgasm, but not allowing it to spurt forth for several more minutes, then withdrew. His breath was fast and shallow as he looked back to the girl’s eyes. He smiled and bent down to her, and placed his lips on hers. Hers were dry, so he licked them until they were moist. Delectable.

Unable to withdraw that time, the doctor kept his mouth against her skin, kissing it, biting it, licking her across her entire body, tasting every inch of her exposed skin, and seeking every crevice hidden from view. Nothing would escape his touch. Nothing would be off-limits. There were no limits.

Jumping like an attacking cat, Thomason settled to his knees between the girl’s legs. He pulled her ankles apart, then got a grip on her hips. He pulled her forcefully closer, and rested her on his thighs. He stopped then, and first reached for her head, to turn it, and position her arms so that she would continue to look towards him, and second, extracted a scalpel from his black bag. The penetrations were simultaneous. One with his flesh into the yeilding space between her legs, and the steel into the soft taut surface of her belly.

He didn’t cut her deeply, just enough to sink his blade so it would not fall away when he let go. With both hands on her hips, he fucked her while the blood flowed out of her stomach, up her body. He watched the blood follow the contours his tongue had traced only moments ago. She weighed nothing it seemed; he could lift and lower her hips to skewer her on his dick as easily as jerking off had ever been.

After only a few seconds, this was not enough. He withdrew, and tried to enter her anally, but found it too dry. Removing his scalpel from its sheath in her stomach, he made a long incision in her thigh, and as the blood ran down her leg, used it to lubricate himself. It went in much easier after that.

Several seconds later, this too was not enough. This was still too easy; Thomason knew he could do more. Leaning forward, the doctor studied her bleeding stomach for a moment, and cut a much deeper, straight line upwards from his original gash. Withdrawing his prick from the girl, he slid it into this new opening, between two strong muscles and into her abdomen. He looked down a long way and could see her head, unmoving, witnessing his power. His absolute control.

It took several more hours for the girl to bleed dry. Thomason didn’t count the orgasms, the spurts of white seman he pumped into her. He sat exhausted, with strained muscles just above the base of his penis he’d never even felt before. Finally, he rose, and wrapped the girl, his clothes, and instruments in the blanket, and sank her in one of the larger pools nearby.

He watched her sink, contemplating his erasure of her existance. It had only taken three hours to accomplish. He stood still for so long that the fauna around him began to return to their normal habits. A loud croak startled Thomason from his trance. He looked up, farther out in the pool, at the bullfrog who alone bore witness.

Finally the realisation struck me one night as I stared stupified at the wall, bored beyond all comprehension. My mind was blank, I was letting it drift of its own accord- something I had neglected to do, as it turns out, in months. Constantly distracting myself with trivialities, I’d dodged the bullet with cunning grace and blinding speed, up until I remembered the book I hadn’t finished. I picked it up and only needed another half-dozen pages before everything caught up with me. The realisation struck me like the lightning whip of some spiny demon, with wrath and pure energy. The fantastic punisher for time wasted, spawned to thrash me into some kind of action.

Months wasted in directionless motion, perpetual sort of self-sustataining rhythms that ate their own tail. My life was becoming an oruboros, leading nowhere, coming from nothing and looking the same everywhere in between. I spent hours watching hundreds of numbers clock upwards at varying rates, XP, agility, professions, copper, silver, gold, armour, dollars, megabytes- all just incrementing at their own pace. All except one: time. Time was decreasing, I was running out. Eventually there would be none left, and then none of those other numbers would matter.

It bent me over, my demon, and took its retribution in sudden searing glimpses of awareness.

I knew I had been trying to do something with my fantasies. I knew I wasn’t entirely aimless, I was however misguided in the extreme. The fantasies, they were a refuge. A shelter from the reality of my constant refusal to accept the charge of life: to live. I lacked the resolve to actually pick up the pen and do what I thought I wanted to, and so I merely fantasized my way through the time. Something had to keep my mind off the fact that I wasn’t actually doing anything, so I filled it with meaningless garbage that didn’t carry weight for anyone, and only I was gullible enough to pay attention to it at all.

The clouds, the haze, the lethargy were all of my own making. I never gave myself the time to actually compose. The fantasies proved that I had the energy, the sheer power, the raw materials for creation, but no discipline. Not an iota of will power that would guide that magic towards some sort of meaning. Some sort of solid resolution that I could point at and call my own. Something I could be proud of. And was that not what I sought? Pride, justification for the space I occupy. There are people who can’t do that, they are vacuums in society that suck everything they touch down into the black hole never to be seen again. Collapsing forever into less and less.

Suddenly I realised I was a black hole. I was drifting through ever-emptying space, with less and less surrounding me to fuel my consumption. Fewer stars drew close enough for me to draw in and crush, and so my isolation grew. The solitude I lamented in my self-indulgent moments, that I blamed for my lack of spontenaiety when I recalled my supposed role as writer. I wanted to be a beacon, and I was the opposite, and that rankled.

In my sudden moment of clarity, I realised, and I shattered the lassitude. I crushed the walls of lethargy that had come in gradually with the tide, and threw back the levees of habit. There was nothing stopping me, I realised, but myself, and I am proven to be an awesome force, a great weight that not even I could overcome without the impetus of a man struck as I have been by the explosion of clairvoyance that does not happen to everyone. Those slugs who meander through the tunnels dug in the ant hill by countless generations before them will not understand. They will not pause to wonder at the momentary nova that occurs inside the head of one in a hundred million people. They will not pause to wonder at the miracle of the world. They will not pause to wonder at the beauty of a storm. They will not even pause and wonder and the intricacies of their own bodies, let alone the infinite complex capacity of their minds.

I had lapsed into the endless automotaun cycle of animal reproduction. Every beast has the instinct to fuck, and like them, I occupied myself with it. Sex is so easy to simplify. To reach an orgasm does not require the cooperation of the intellect, nor of the spirit. And an orgasm feels a little like inspiration. But only a little. Here and now I have the power of a god. I have creation at my fingertips. With but a flutter of my irreplicable digits I can summon worlds, vast cities of modernity, or the fields of fantasy, any man, woman or child I can concieve so can I create. I am God of the mind, so long as I put the words to the page.

With a head full of ego, I attack the blankness. That white expanse that sickens my heart and ignites my passion (or crushes it like a beetle when I let it) will not outlast me. Giddy with excitement, I am flush with potential, but more, I am tense with exertion. Nothing is beyond the determined person. We are the lords of the land, should we put our minds to it. No president, no king, not tzar or pharoh was a more remarkable creature than I am. The test is determination, can we outlast ourselves? Within each of us is the potential monarch, and the potential pauper. No pharoh was any different to the slave he whipped. No millionaire had any greater powers than that of the transient.

Accuse me of over-simplification, I invite you. Yet anyone reading this work now has already triumphed over the circumstances that they would cite to excuse the fallen, the failed. Would they degrade that accomplishment? Would they admit to doing nothing with their fortunes? Or would they accept their responsibility, their singular opportunity to escape failure by acting? Any act, every act is a miracle in that it will never be replicated. Nothing can be duplicated for every one who acts is unique. Should that not be celebrated? The very fact of individual existance is utterly incomprehensibly unlikely that it demands an effort of supreme proportions to mould into the most wonderous existance possible. No laziness can be justified, no inaction can ever be excused because there is no return! There is no chance to set right was is wasted.

The only numbers that matter are the seconds that tick down on life’s clock. Mankind has sought to dilute their importance, by first making them increment, rather than decrement, and then by placing them on a circle. Clocks create the illusion that tomorrow is just like today. Every day has a ten o’clock in the morning. We refer to them all in the same way, except that none of them bear any resemblance to those that came before. Mankind crouches in fear of time, trying to harness it in incrementation, but cannot escape it. Eventually the clock winds out and the countdown is realised.

What a mind-blow it would be for a person of this world to glimpse the world of a men who know how long they will live. They are given an allotment, an allocation of days months and years with which to make something of themselves, known commonly throughout their life. What then? Would even a fraction of a second be wasted? Such a world would destroy the word leisure. Recreation would be a sort of religious practice. The enjoyment of life would be absolutely paramount! Why waste a finite time in sadness or boredom or lassitude? How much more determined would those men be. Nothing would be put off until tomorrow, ever. Every person’s goal would constantly remain common, that goal to fulfill one’s dreams and throwing what we would call obligations to the wind.

Every creative explosion would be honoured for its uniqueness, so obvious to a man who knows on what day he will die. Each individual crystalline perfect moment would be drunk like the finest wine. And the finest wine would be drunk without exception- who would spend their finite life guzzling cheap piss?

A man who knows his day is coming would have no fear. No chance could be ignored. No desire unattempted. No curiousity unexplored. The risk of failure would be nothing as compared to the risk of losing the one opportunity that will ever present itself. With dogged determination such a man would pursue his dreams, with reckless abandon he would throw himself towards his goals. Without restraint. Without fear.

To know death’s date is to annihilate its only power.

Man fears death. We are terrified of that great unknown, the finality from which there is no return. Like the journey overseas to a foreign land from which we do not have the means to return. It looms over us like a slowly approaching flood, wavering in the distance, difficult to see, and promises absolute irradication. It is far easier, tremendously easier to turn our backs to it, and pretend death does not exist, that we are immortal. Easier to live in delusion than face fear. And so billions of lives are pissed away in terror- in thousands of fears that replace the one we choose to ignore.

What is embarassment against the fear of death? I know the nervous paralysis that asphixiates a young man too fearful of rejection to bring himself to ask a girl out. Yet if that man knew he had a finite time on the planet in which to find that one woman he could love, his fear would vanish faster than a flash of lightning. What is risk? Would a man approaching his end hesitate to throw his lot in and sail that boat across the Carribbean? What has he to lose? Not time, time is worthless because it is finite. Only experience is infinite. Every moment is utterly unique and must be treated as such, tasted like a vintage found only in one bottle. One bottle, one second. Time is known, because each man knows he will die. Every man is mortal- could anyone really live in true denial? A matter of time then, a question of quantity. How long? How little time would one have to hold in reserve, before he throws caution out the window? Fifty years? If you are to live only fifty more years, would you ask her, would you buy the boat? Thirty years? Ten years? Ten minutes? Where is the turning point? At what exact duration does life become worth living? Justify that.