I sat there,

watching as he fell to his doom.

Sitting as always,

although I knew it.

I saw it,

before it happened.

And I let it.

I let his fate get sealed.

I beat the dead horse.

The sky, so far above looks down on me and I look up at it and see its sadness. The sky looks down yet it's view is clouded by pollution and smoke from raging wildfires. It wished the world would slow and take a look around at all that is good and all that is bad and decide to fix what is wrong before it speeds up again. The sky sees the animals running from lost of forest, it sees wars that would never have happened if humans hadn't said a few incautious words, it sees bullies and friends, lies add truth, death and birth, all the amazing things the world holds.

The sky shines with millions of stars, each the soul of a missed friend, maybe one from falling forests, maybe one from wars, maybe two from lies, maybe five hundred from death, and none from joy. Each star holds life and each sky holds stars. Each human holds the power of stars in their hands if they only cared to listen to the peaceful whispering of the sky.

---

you were packing your stuff

your then girlfriend was helping out

I was sitting on the carpet

ripping off the woolen threads

and there was someone else there

but I don’t remember much

and I keep forgetting things

but I swear you stood on top

of the bed, and I don’t know why

but I burned it all in my head:

yachts, money, Thailand, a reunion

Berlin, a house, carpentry, coding

a family, your future son's name,

coming back, leaving, all the shit

your mom gives you that idles unused

like your vitamin tablets - luggage a

portable pharmacy that can make a

hospital cross blush; everything

was slipping through grins while around

the corners of our mouth were accordion

lines playing farewells and goodbyes.

I thought at the time, "I'd miss this"

& it took me out & I felt like

an old man fading away, replaying

watercolor memories blended

together uncommaed

with all the mojito whites peacock greens

summer-dazed ambers lavalamp indigos

Miles Davis blues 3AM blacks stoplight reds

swallowing, dancing, sleeping all over

until the brush strokes mere dry

crusted horse hairs, and there's nothing

but the sound of it scraping

away the dust that's layered over thick.

Yet when this word "midding"

flashed that still on cranium dome,

there's no longing, no nostalgia, no missing

but just love,

reminding me that even though

yachts, money, Thailand, a reunion

Berlin, a house, carpentry, coding

a family, your future son's name,

coming back, leaving will all never happen,

what we he had did,

and that's good enough for me.

---

Things usually bend before they break. They warn you of their failure with hairline cracks and fractures. But if you live with your demons long enough things get brittle. And when the fall happens, it happens all at once.

I’m back in town in late October, the season in Chicago when it’s not so cold yet the air slices your skin like a driven nail, but cold enough that steam billows from the subway vents making the whole city feel foggy, and the sky turns that mournful shade of withering gray. I walk the broad streets and breathe in the smells of diesel and popcorn. I want to say I miss them, but my lungs feel like they’re full of ash. A shadow passes above.

I tell myself it’s a plane because that’s what I always do, and if I don’t look up I can believe that’s true.

I call up my old college buddy Nigel to see if he can meet for beers and wings like we did in the old days. I told my girlfriend I was here on a business trip, but really I just needed to get away from… well, you know… or maybe you don’t. But I was fleeing all the same.

Nigel and I used to haunt the bars of Lakeview, but I guess we’ve grown up since then. He wants to meet at a more upscale pizza place downtown. I walk there past dark alleys and see them out of the corner of my eye, the lethal shadows hiding behind dumpsters and peeking out from around corners, dripping with ichor, and their faces full of hate. I turn up the collar on my jacket against the lake shore wind.

I settle into the booth across from Nigel and exchange the usual pleasantries. I absentmindedly tear off a piece of pizza while he catches me up on his work at the museum where they’ve received a new collection of precious stones from… well, I don’t catch that part. I’m only half listening as I gaze between the window blinds at the darkening sky, and I think I see the beating of huge wings in the haze above. I shake off the vision. Now isn’t the time. I take a sip of my beer but it’s flat and acrid.

Nigel carries on. He’s always been the life of the party. We met back in college when he would drag me to parties with inflatable pools, kegs, and pretty girls. He would dance and make friends and get phone numbers, but I never quite fit in. I just felt like people were always staring at me. Maybe I was wrong, I’m an anxious man. But they’re staring at me now.

I snap to and look out over the restaurant and everyone is looking at me, like a butcher looks at meat. I hear the rhythmic pounding of the dragon’s wings. I feel the shadows creep from the alleys, all swaddled in knives and rage.

Nigel talks about his trip to Maui and his fling with a Korean expat. He orders a margarita and I feel a pain in my gut and double over, coughing up blood on the seat of the booth. The clouds close in like smoke in a burning house. I look up and see Nigel sip his drink as the crowd cheers against the Marlins. I start to feel myself slip but I don’t call out to him. We were never that close.

No one really knew exactly what caused it. With such a traumatic series of events pinpointing the moment her body decided to drain itself of all colour was difficult. Was it the argument between her parents that she witnessed from the top of the stairs when the shouting woke her from sleep? Perhaps it was seeing her father smash the TV in anger, and then throw it into the wall, sending their happy-family photographs crashing to the floor. Maybe it was being pulled from her home, barefooted in her pajamas to her mother's car in a bid at escape, shrieking in terror as the car flew through the streets, her father's headlights blindingly close behind. It could have been the moment the car left the tarmac and hurtled head-over-heels down the verge, or the instant her small frame hit the roof as she was thrown about. She wouldn't have seen her mother's death, but the sight of her corpse hanging through the windscreen as she was carried to the ambulance may have done it. Or maybe it was being told by a police officer in the stark white of the hospital room that her father had also been killed as he drove his car into oncoming traffic, and that she was now a ward of the state to be placed with a family of strangers once she could leave the hospital. Maybe it was the humiliation of being given a handful of her belongings, collected without her consult, in a black rubbish sack; all that she had in the world. Whatever caused it, her hair had grown silver-white since then. She wore it short these days, and despite it's origins she had rather come to like it.

Roses are red,

violets are blue,

sugar is sweet,

and perhaps so are you,

but the roses have wilted,

the violets are dead,

the sugar bowl is empty

and your wrists stained red,

the sun isn't shining

the sky isn't clear

there is no silver lining cause you're no longer here

Rain keeps on pouring,

there is no end in sight,

you're laying there frozen

so far from the light

your beauty's unreal

your smile is the sun

but time can't be turned nor your action undone

the words that you wrote that I only read,

"I love you so much please don't cry when I'm dead",

A bond that was formed,

a love that ran deep

a friend I could keep

I wanted to hold you

wipe the tears from your eyes

been there for thmoment you said said your goodbyes.

I want to forget but most times I don't

I want to let go

but I know that I won't

tears on my face

memories burned in my head,

the roses have wilted,

the violets are dead.

The nightly inhabitants of the house were playing cards in the dining room when they heard a creak on the stairs, breaking their focused silence.

“It can’t be…” The demon drawled.

“Oh dear, at this hour?” The ghost gasped.

“Quickly, we must hide!” The witch wailed.

The demon dove into the shadows of the tupperware cabinet. The ghost glided into the kitchen floor, now an invisible apparition. The witch whipped out her wand and, in the blink of an eye, became as transparent as the other two, watching the hall where a monster was entering.

“Waaaterr…” It rasped, terrible teeth glinting with metal and warning colors.

The creature shuddered slightly as it passed through the witch, a shaky hand reaching for the refrigerator door. It hissed as bright light turned its pupils to pinpoints, blindly reaching for the bottle of clear liquid and some other containers of food.

The way the monster ate was ravenous and illogical, even for its daytime standards. After gulping down the entire bottle of water and lazily throwing the container in a rough estimate of where the trash can was and missing by a lot, it prowled to an odd, box-like machine with its finds from the fridge. It added water and slid the unholy food choice, mac and cheese mixed with ramen and marshmallows, into the machine, carefully typing in a number.

After pressing start, the food began to turn about in the machine and cook. The witch saw the ghost quickly move out of the way as the monster sat on the floor.

“What is it?” The ghost mouthed to her.

The witch replied, “A human... you know, the daytime inhabitants? Only, this is the most dangerous kind: a teenager. My book of shadows says they tend to act in strange ways in the night...” She was proud to say that she had done plenty of research on the things that lived in the house when the sun was up.

A fast movement in the corner of her eye made her heart skip a beat. Looking back to the human, she realized that it had suddenly stopped the machine on its last second. Shifting back to slower, dazed movements, the human lumbered to the dining table.

A dreadful thought occurred to the witch at the same time she heard the monster mutter “wassallthishere”. She had left her tarot cards on the table!

Keeping up her invisibility spell, she tiptoed to the room to find... the monster making unusual noises as it picked up one of the cards. Laughter?

It had abandoned their food on the table and was focusing on stifling the snickers, practically doubled over. The witch looked over the human’s shoulder to see what the commotion was about.

There on the gold-painted card, was a skeleton brandishing a scythe over a field of bodies. ‘Number 13: Death’, it read.

“Mood,” the teenager kept repeating, pointing to the skeleton’s haunting grin. Taking a marker from a nearby desk, it drew a blue flame around one of the skeleton’s empty eyes. The human wheezed even harder, threatening to lose its midnight snack to an upturned stomach.

When it finally calmed down, the human finished its impulse-meal and carefully padded up the stairs, taking the tarot card with it.

“No, my favorite card!” The witch whisper-screamed when it left, her spell now unfocused in her anger.

“Do you wish for me to go retrieve it?” The demon reappeared, smiling his twisted smile. “I could give the boy night terrors until he is forced to return it…”

“Actually, I think that it was a girl human,” the witch cut him off. “The girls usually have longer hair than the boys-- but none of that matters.” She waved off the demon’s idea. “I can create a copy of the card for the next telling, and the human has already drawn on it.”

“What a horrible little thing,” the witch kept murmuring as wrappers and crumbs flew by them, into the waste bin they belonged in. “Can’t even pick up after itself.”

“Did I used to be like that? That nonsensical?” The ghost wondered aloud.

The demon was bored of their complaints, and knew that, with a blood-red sunrise greeting them, their time here was up. “Enough talk of it, tomorrow we will play games as always… human or no human present.”

Melting into the shadows once more, he said his farewells: “Bitter nightmares. Don’t let the humans bite.”

“Bitter ’mares,” the witch and ghost echoed, joining him in the darkness for the daytime folk to take over.