QUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

        I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:

                 "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—

                 Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

        "This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?"

        My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

        "Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you're at—there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. "You can tell me when I've worked through that," says he, looking as fierce as a commander.

        And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.

        He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove or upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came about our house soon learned to let him be. Every day when he came back from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid them. When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow (as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present. For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg" and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough when the first of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my four-penny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."

        How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

        But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the other to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question, or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not following his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

        His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were—about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.

        In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

        All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.

        He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow. I followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting, far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he—the captain, that is—began to pipe up his eternal song:

                 "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—

                 Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

                 Drink and the devil had done for the rest—

                 Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

        At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence. The voices stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath, "Silence, there, between decks!"

        "Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

        The old fellow's fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand, threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

        The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him as before, over his shoulder and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady: "If you do not put that knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall hang at the next assizes."

        Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like a beaten dog.

        "And now, sir," continued the doctor, "since I now know there's such a fellow in my district, you may count I'll have an eye upon you day and night. I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this. Let that suffice."

        Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.

Some stuff smells. Singapore smells somewhat scorched. Smelling salts smell significantly strong. Shit smeared stirrups smell. Scum soaked socks sometimes smell surprisingly sweet (so said some sage). So singularly secular, such smells seem..... Suppose, say, Sunday some silly says, "Smelling suppresses society, stop smelling !" Said someone saying such seriously stupid stuff should seek solace someplace secret.

Alone. Surrounded by people. With strange eyes and hidden intentions. The girl-who-was-almost-a-woman shrugged her heavy backpack onto her shoulders as she searched for somewhere to sit, somewhere to lay her head. The ferry was filled to brimming, as people milled about, some heading to cabins, those with cheap tickets scanning the common areas for somewhere to sink to the floor. Somewhere they might be able to snatch a few hours of precious sleep, if the seas weren't too rough, if they could keep the harsh flicker of the fluorescent light from permeating their eye-lids.

Already territory was being claimed and defended - hostile expressions warding off any who sought a spot too close to the first settlers. Even spaces further away were full. The girl-who-was-almost-a-woman had been one of the final passengers to step aboard, so there was nowhere for her to go.

The boom of the ferry horn ripped through the air and she felt it shudder through her as the mooring lines were cast off - and the great, hulking vessel left the dock. Piraeus was bathed in the lazy golden sunlight of the evening, softening the edges of the cityscape and lending it a romantic aspect. She almost longed to be back on land - rather than amongst this territorial rabble, but the ferry was heading out to sea and unless she jumped into the frothy, murky depths, there was no-where else to go until morning. The decks were mostly empty now, but the wind bit at her hair and whipped sea spray through the air. Even so high above the water.

She needed somewhere quiet and dry, somewhere as yet unclaimed. She waited until the sun had snatched the last light from the sky and the stars had winked into view. Then crept towards the cabins. To the warm, quiet dry corridors. Somewhere she could roll out her sleeping mat and close her weary eyes.

A place not too far from the door to the deck, that she might be able to get out quick if she needed to, but not too close to the common areas, that there would be many people walking past. The hall was empty and she was soon spread out, grinning at her own cleverness at finding somewhere to rest her head. She was between two cabin doors, tucked as close to the wall as possible, so there was still room to walk past her.

She was just drifting off to sleep, when sounds filtered through. Little yelps. The girl-who-was-almost-a-woman startled awake and sat up. Was someone in trouble? She listened carefully - the sounds unabated. Her eyes turned round when she realised they were sounds of pleasure, rather than of pain. She could have moved, she should have moved. But she stayed - and listened as an entire soundtrack of desire played out, to the last shuddering groan.

She left the ferry in the morning but the memory stayed with her. A lasting souvenir.

In the years that come and pass, things come to fruition, whether they are gilded with golden fingertips, or if they are enclosed with ugliness. Lessons are learned, drama is settled, but some things are built to last, built to be mad at the world, delirious with grandeur, but fuming with anger. Especially in a young person's life when the years are so few, and the speed of which they move is everso quickening. Ambition, love, maturity, optimisim, ethics, morals: these all surface in the beginning and resonate. Life caters to your choices, your way of cracking the case. But never does it do you any favors unless it is seen as somewhat deserving.

I'm writing this now because, I myself am scared. I'm sick to my stomach, dreading the idea of things faltering, becoming maddening at sight. I have ambitions, I have needs, I have my own set of morals established under contexts of which are necessary to create. In words fewer than the ones I've used, a single listless word known with bitterness in tone, I'm stuck. Stuck in Jell-O, stuck in a glass Coke bottle, stuck in that bacon grease jar that you keep underneath your sink...stuck, stuck, stuck. Stuck in the modern-electricity-solar-powered-overwhelming world of death, taxes, and the obsoletion of jazz music, of long, sleak cars, of boxy television screens, of Paul, John, George, and Ringo living in my radio, of a president wanting to make a difference and having his life taken from him in response, of black and white movies, and of men wearing suits and ties like they were sweatpants and a hoodie.

It hurts thinking that time is passing and with it comes the death of others there to witness, to experience, to retell those stories to kids like me who are so hungry, they would rather push the future away and stare at those pictures of the past. I want nostalgia, I want ambition, I want something pure and awesome and geniune, instead of wondering what sort of chemicals have been stuffed inside a loaf of Sunbeam bread. I want to get married and drive a Plymouth and come home to my beautifully colorful house, with my family jumping in my arms. I want to place my hat on my son, with it being too big for his little six-year-old head, and have him smell the inseam, knowing his father was working hard all day to provide a good life for him. I want the little tabby cat to brush against my pant leg and lick his paws clean. I want to open a bottle of High Life and plop in my chair at the dining room table and scoop mashed potatoes on my plate. I want my daugther to sit across from her brother and make faces with her spoon at him, while they crack up and I join them soon after, with their mother giving me that wonderfully pleasant look of...of what? Of no regrets, no coulda-woulda-shouldas? I want to retire from the dinner table, after having helped my wife with the dishes, giving her a few playful shoves and a dollop of soap on her nose. I want to go into my office, located in the perfect corner of the house to where the children won't run on top and my wife won't throw her heels on the floor when she's concerned on what to wear the next day. I want to look at my typewriter, gleaming in moonlight, and rub my fingers against the keys. I want to create that pleasant, beautiful story in the typewriter, the one that will change the lives of so many who can relate, reform, and redeem themselves with it. I want to see my name bulging out of cornershop windows and shed a tear while I watch. I want to indulge in beer every once and a while when it comes to celebrating. I want to watch my son learn how to drive my stick shift and knock a tail light out backing out of the driveway. I want to watch my daughter marry a wonderful person and have them shake my hand with intensity. I want my wife to kiss me goodnight every night, even when I'm traveling for business. I want her to wink at me from across the living room, when my feet are propped up and I have the little yellow notepad sitting crooked in my lap, and the pen in my hands is moist from ambitious procrastination. GOD! I see this life in the movies I watch, in the books I read, and in the culture I indulge in, and it is not a culture of this time. This is a culture of many years ago, years when Mantle was swinging a hot bat and when Stephen King was a college student at the University of Maine. The 1960's, my wonderful audience, was the time of life when it seemed enriching, harnessing, carelessly unpredictable, and exciting. Geniune feelings and emotions not botched and bothered with social media and the political hoaxes that make up our climate now. I acknowledge that there were faults, but the turning point is only as powerful as the people who remember. Faults that turned into history books, that turned into entire libraries housing information.

I'm stuck, my fellow peers. Stuck in the sick realization that I can't relive this era. I can't smell the fresh, unpolluted air of America. All I know how to do is write those stories and tell them to others. It's the only thing I know how to do and do right. To dwell is to enrich as is to settle is to find no pure happiness. My theory may be unsettling, but why bother sugarcoating?

Italics is the typographic equivalent of underlining. Detalics is the typographic equivalent of undermining. Normally, italics is a slanted (to the right) cursive font of calligraphic handwriting, first used by Aldus Manutius and his press in Venice in 1500. Alternatively, detalics is slanted to the left.

It is a subtle distinction, as opposed to life and death, which are, respectively, underlined to the right and to the left.

I feel that nothing I do is important, nor worth underlining. I live my life in detail. I live leaning to the left. Does that sound sinister?

My biggest fear in life is that there will be—understood in a goes-without-sayingvsort of way—an embarrassing, deprecatory, and/or shameless exposure of me, relegated to that most feared of typographic sentinels.

What is that? you ask.

That sentinel can be affixed to my name. It is like a bullet that goes through both sides of my head, ending up outside, to the right. (Thus, like italics, it—and bullets, in general—lean to the right.)

And that typographic mortal blow is the asterisk.

I have an asterisk next to my name as if it is following me, and it is, because it follows my name.

It could be worse.

I could be followed by a footnote, with a full haranguing diatribe encased forever in posterity. A philippic of venom. A tirade a dozen invectives more than a full rant. (1 rant + 12 invectives = 1 rant.)

I block my entire legacy to change the font, style, and point-size. But that's not good enough. After blocking it again, I [CMD+X] it. Poof! There goes the Garamond. Poof! There goes the bold! The italics! The detalics!

But somewhere there is a remnant of it all—of me in detalics—written in cursive. In a notebook. One with coffee stains on it and perhaps even some squashed bug foolish enough to worm its way in between some pages further compressed by the coffee mug itself.

That bug is me.

Better that I not be an open book. Better that I be glyphicked in byzantine scribblings that only a cypher on the other side of the world can de-cipher. Reverse the tilt from left to right. De-talic the detalics until the sinister decays in reverse from maladroit to adroit. I long to be a droit. I long to be italicized, my asterisk plucked away and my footnotes whitewashed like weatherworn graffiti.

My Irish bloodline is more personal trivia than heritage. My forbears sailed across the sea to farm in Pennsylvania nearly two centuries before my birth and roughly a generation before the Potato Famine, all of which is to say, there’s a great deal of distance there. Ireland is an abstraction, and my connection to it is ancestral rather than lived.

I never experience that connection more strongly than when I listen to The Pogues, “Thousands Are Sailing.” That song encapsulates anything I’ve ever read, seen, heard, or felt of my Irish heritage. There’s a push and a pull, grief and love, genuflection and spit, grit and pride. It’s a great song.

Since Prose no longer permits links and I cannot paste one below, I urge you to go to YouTube and search for "The Pogues Thousands are Sailing lyrics." By all means, wear the green plastic hat, drink the Shamrock Shake, tell the kids the leprechaun left a chocolate gold coin, and down some Guinness and Jameson alongside your corned beef. But if you can spare five minutes and twenty odd seconds this St. Patrick’s Day, give them to The Pogues and think of the Irish.

It felt like sound itself was leaking out of my ears. I imagined it like mist. Hissing away as I stared at the ceiling that felt closer than it was. Hanging chandeliers above me like taunting me with its riches.

Was it possible to lose this much?

My hands tingled while they shook.

Brokenly, I let my head anchor down, letting my line of sight hit the ground and tremble around all the friends littered there. A fancy dance floor of ebony creased with gold in that Japanese way where destruction was held together with beauty. Where history was carved into their craft instead of discarded.

I almost laughed. But my chest clung on to a sob.

The history of my friends were pouring out of their bodies. But why? I was no new customer to misfortune but this... why? The one time-- the one time I tried to make amends to all of them, all the wrongs I did them. They'd barely forgave me, barely wanted to trust my invitation to this place where pasts were supposed to be forgotten, or so I believed.

But these hands didn't lie.

They abused reality, and distorted my life with supernatural things that could not be understood but, unlike me, they didn't lie...

These powers were real. Destructive and unforgiving and tear---

[Timer went off there^]

[But I'll illegally continue here:]

---ing even parties apart. What was left of my life to tear apart?

I cried out. Loud and hysterical and on the border between a laugh and a cry but who could hear me with my sound spilling out of my ears and buildings quaking apart at the sight of my fists. And histories. Entire histories, rich with their untold stories and verdicts of forgiveness, shattering before I ever got the chance to hear my own: 'I'm sorry'.

I'm in a fucking rut and I hate it. I have so much that I feel like I could be doing. I could be finding a job or writing my screenplay or something but instead I just take depression naps. Even my dreams are starting to get stressful. Every other dream is about a test that I have to take that is daunting. I hate taking them. The latest was on King Kong Island and my friend, Fae, and I had to take on caring for children after taking Ernest and Son's Green Busses out into the ocean to try to get them to the next island before King Kong Island burned down. It was an amusement park island and the kids were all children of the staff. Before that, my partner had bestowed upon me a shadow necklace so I could have him there whenever I missed him. It was a really nice gift.

Let's see what other dreams did I have? I had the one with my cousin coming into a job agency I worked at. She's my older cousin and I haven't seen her since I was sixteen. She called me high once and I prefer to not remember it. I know she needed me but I was so upset she had th audacity to call me when high. I mean, I'm sure she wouldn;t have done so if she didn't need help. She didn't even ask me for money. I think she was just in a bad ordeal and needed help. I haven't talked to her since but she comes in my dreams every once in awhile.

What else happens up there? There's a school that's like a huge mall. I don't think I can keep going for another nine minutes honestly. I am getting tired as we speak. O did an interview today and except for having no idea what software they use, I think it went pretty well. I didn't do much dazzling though. You always know when someone is intrigued by you when you talk to them and they never shut up. At least that's what happens to me. People pick a few little things I say then I can pick up on what htey say and then we've got a conversation going. But, this time it was awkward. There were paises. I don't know what to make of it honestly. I;m about to go to the grocery store so I guess I'll fill out one of their applications. Kroger is always hiring.

I used to dream about getting a big break when this whole joblessness thing started. I would work from home. I would make more than I've ever seen before. A salary. Benefits. Pet insurance. I would get a pet turtle named Biff to celebrate. He would fart and shit out of his tail and stink up my room. It was the dream. I still have eggs in baskets. There's a speechwriting job that I had my hopes up for. I don't know why I don't tether those little bastards. Hopes and dreams are for losers, I'm starting to think. It makes me feel bad to be such a cynic but honestly, I really do feel that way. So long as I don't forget my pen, I'll make sure I sign up to work at Kroger. I could work in the deli. I could be the guy who keeps Rob from losing his finger when he slices it off after we're talking about my dreams and he gets so enamored with my brain that he loses his head... well, pinky, to the meat cutter.

What is that thing called. Will I be like the black lady in that meme where the woman hops over the counter and she's like unless your name is Salami, you shouldn't be back here and the woman's like I'm hiding from my ex, and the Black lady decides the woman can stay? I like that gif but I never was destined to be that woman. I mean, if people want to sit up straight and look both ways and cross their T's and dot their I's, that's fine by me but I'm a slouching writer who sleeps too much and dreams even more. I like to have my head in the clouds which is probably why I'm feeling the brunt of this hiring freeze. I think I'm doing okay but honestly I couldn't be sure either way. I have money, just a bit. Enough to enjoy the casino tomorrow with my mom and my grandmother and anyone else that comes. I just wish I was in a better position in life, you know?

It’s dark.

Yellow streetlights cast a dusty light into the room, illuminating little.

I can’t see the floor. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me. But I can feel that the room is small.

The walls are close. The air thick.

Cluttered.

I can sense how cluttered it is. An odor of something rotten.

Do I smell paint?

I’m not sure how I got here, but I know I need to get out.

The only way out is forward. Through the room.

I’m cautious where I step, feeling with my toe because I can’t see the floor.

Through the side window, the foggy gold from the street turns to a dingy beige within.

A table beneath the window holds piles. Books, papers, dirty dishes left over from who knows when. Beyond the table, a bench seat is built into the corner walls.

The ceiling is low.

Am I in a trailer?

The door must be off to the right, in the darkness.

I grasp at the dark and take a step. I stumble over something. A step stool? What’s on the floor?

A faint outline catches my eye.

Is someone standing there? Motionless?

My ears prickle. My heart pounds.

I lunge forward, kicking something hard with my shin.

It knocks into other unseen things. Clattering, scraping. Crashes fill the room.

So loud!

I lunge again. There must be a door.

I see it. Faint in the dark. I stride again, as if through a dumpster. My fingers touch the wooden door, thin and cheap. It’s ajar.

My body, already committed, pushes it open. It does easily, and I lose balance.

I fall to my knees, bracing myself as my hands feel the ground of the next room.

Shag carpet.

A noise behind me.

Still on the ground, I kick the door closed behind me. Hard. The cheap wood splinters.

In another room now. Still dark.

Something large looms in the center of the room. Is it moving?

I struggle to my feet. I can see a door behind the heap.

Light– still tan, still dirty– oozes in through shards of greasy glass.

I heave myself, a single stride, then another. Clamoring past the shadow, it tugs at my pantlegs.

I explode into the outside air.

Seaside saltiness, yet cloying and muggy.

A noise behind me.

I stand atop a thin staircase, wooden and decrepit.

No railing.

Rock wall just out of reach.

The stairs spiral down into darkness.

The Flash Fiction Challenge:

Write a complete story in 500 words or less, focusing on a single, powerful moment.

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