Tag: fantasy

Nobody Said It Would Be Easy

You just need a little guidance. Your youth and inexperience are holding you back. I can help. Within a few hours this world of ours will begin to disintegrate. You have a choice. You can stay here and turn into a vampire, a werewolf, or a zombie or some kind of weirdo that nobody wants to have around, or you can simply go with the flow. You can fall into that lake of molten fire. The one over there. It’s actually liquid sulfur. That’s why it smells so bad.

Don’t let the smell upset you. You won’t be alive long enough to smell much because sulfur melts at two hundred forty degrees. Your blood will boil, your brain will fry inside your skull and all the meat on your bones will be “well done” within minutes.

So it’s up to you. You can change or you can cease to exist. Neither will be as easy as you would like, but then nobody asked your opinion about the severity of the choice. This is the nature of the world we’ve inherited.

Images of a loving God providing guidance and refuge have long since fallen out of favor. Now, if people worship anything, they worship health and longevity. After most people died of Covid-22, the mutation that kept on mutating, nobody expected things to ever improve. Nobody even dared hope for things to return to the way they were.

The fact is that everybody has problems. Nobody has it easy. If you’re a zombie, you’ve got to find brains to eat. A vampire has to drink blood. A werewolf…well, he has more options than the other two, but they mostly involve ripping people to shreds and howling at the moon.

The main hurdle most of us face is finding someone with whom we have enough in common to build a life together. Of course, most of us can do this for a short while and then become bored and tear the life out my the roots and throw it by the side of the road. If we can refrain from doing this we’re soon ahead of the game. We can realize opportunities, we can know relative freedom and partial contentment.

Until we decide that’s not enough. It would be easier to simply acknowledge our part in this instead of blaming circumstances and others, but that doesn’t come easily to most people. We think “if only I had married that other person…” Or “look at his house, his car…why does he have it so good?” And so we build a tangled web of confusion, and find ourselves trapped inside it. Our frustration and self-pity skyrocket.

Sodomites with Attitude

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My older sister was not a nice person. Being mean earned her a certain amount of respect, and both men and women were afraid of crossing her. She would make you pay for any challenge or disrespect. Oddly enough, men found that alluring. She had more boyfriends than any one woman could use.

When she smiled, which was almost never, she could be attractive. When she looked at you like she wanted to dissect you, which was most of the time, she left an impression. She was without a doubt a featured player in nightmares all over town.

At first, no one would believe she was my sister. I am passive to a fault, meek and humble. My major failing is that I’m too nice a guy. But I have limits. I can snap, and have in the past. Those people in South America were threatening us. Even though I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I could sense their vehemence.

If she had been along on that trip, I probably could have restrained myself. But she wasn’t. It was just me and my niece and nephew, and somebody needed to protect them. Anyway, that’s the past. There were no consequences, at least for us. We have moved on.

I’ve been told that I’m quick to point out the flaws in others, but slow to do so in myself. That’s probably right. I can tell you that my sister is a player, a manipulator, but I probably do the same only in my own perhaps more subtle way. I could have been a salesman if I’d wanted to work, but I have never wanted to do so. Thank God our parents left us a substantial inheritance!

We are sodomites and proud of it. Although we don’t choose conflict, we are surrounded by those who want to judge us. Some want to save us, others merely choose to condemn. No matter how hard you try, you will never convince us to change. We don’t try to change you, so why do you try to change us? Are you so unsure of your convictions that you need us to agree with you?

Yesterday, a big man came to our house and began to pound on the front door. We watched him through the curtains and waited for him to go away. He pounded for ten minutes at least. Maybe fifteen. After he left we were nervous and whispered among ourselves. Would he come back? Would he bring others with him? We have a video surveillance camera that recorded him if we needed to give it to the police, but in our experience we are better off leaving the police out of our affairs. They do not favor Sodomites.

Our parents practiced an antique religion, full of oppressive ritual and pointless sacrifice. When I think of all the innocent birds and reptiles who shed blood to allow my parents and their friends to feel they were supplicating evil spirits I feel nothing but shame. Fortunately, when they passed their religion passed with them. They called themselves “The Old Believers of the Dolorous Path.” Somewhere on YouTube there is a low quality video of one of their ceremonies. You can clearly hear the howling of frightened animals and the weeping of children mixed with the gruff chanting of the elders. It is a dark video, with splashes of red illuminated by candlelight.

Lock-Down

 

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You’ll have to stay put until something can be established. As long as no one is certain what’s going on, or can reasonably describe what happened, we’re going into lock-down mode. All exits will be sealed until further notice.

People don’t just turn into liquid and flow down the street. Babies don’t spontaneously combust. Sure, unusual things can happen, but then the burden of proof is greater. No one is going to believe you were taken up to Heaven, met Jesus, and then came back down to Earth to tell us all about it. At least they won’t believe it unless you can start showing some miraculous proof.

Miraculous proof is all that we require. Oh, and promotion. Nothing matters without proper promotion. In a better world the important and true would rise to the top, but not here. On this miserable rock bathed in a veil of tears, if it hasn’t gone viral, it simply hasn’t gone anywhere.

What you witnessed may or may not have happened. You might be deluded. Many deluded people aren’t aware of their condition. Look at our President. Just because you fervently believe in something doesn’t mean it exists. Artistic types make stuff up all the time. Some are quite convincing, but everything they invent is conjured up out of thin air.

These are not necessarily bad people who invent things that don’t actually exist. They might be benevolent, caring, imaginative, and supportive of creativity in others. They might also be pathological liars. We who are inclined of give the benefit of doubt are potential victims of this latter group.

And so for the time being we must seal or borders. We must suspect that everyone has a malevolent purpose. Their intentions are to do us harm. “What would Jesus do?” you ask. He would do what we are doing. He would hunker down.

“But” you protest “the Jesus I met in Heaven after I had been swept up to kneel at his feet would embrace even the most snarky of us.” Maybe. But we are not Jesus.

We are simply your neighbors who are trying to make the best of a bad situation. We did not cause this calamity, but we are trying to minimize the negative outcomes. Maybe there won’t be any. Indeed, we could be making a mountain out of a molehill. But someone did testify that he saw another person liquefy and that other person has not been seen since. There is a noticeable smell in the air, like burnt toast, except it smells a bit like burnt rubber and burnt toast. There is also a dog that won’t stop barking, but no one has been able to find the dog. So we are confused and anxious. We will batten down the hatches until the storm has passed.