Space is cold. She’s cold like the glare of a woman who once loved you but has now decided she’s better off if you’re dead. Better off with a little lead in the right spot.

  I never minded that glare. A man can walk away. Two good shoes. A cigarette. A long walk into the dark of night down cold streets bathed in hollow, electric lights, where the neon glow of diner signs always hum their entrancing tune: “Open all night—drop your cash and forget your sins.”

  A man could hide in the caramel burn of rye sliding down his throat, the haze of a good smoke curling around his chin, the ringing echo of the jazzman’s fingers romancing the white and black keys of his brown piano, and the inane chatter of some doll pretty enough to stroke an ego and kill an hour.

  Yes, a man can walk away from a broad’s cold glare. How does he walk away from stars?

  Damned things. They just remind me of her.

  Who? Can’t say. Someone I think I used to know.

  I pat myself down, looking for my cigarette case and lighter. Then it hits me like a runaway truck racing down a mountain:

  “What the hell am I?”

  My hands—or what’s left of them—slap and slide across the slimy mess I’ve become. My eyes pop wide open like slugs leaping from a .38 Special. All of them.

  “And where the hell are my cigarettes?”

  I find nothing but horror. No smokes. No man. Just a slimy, round, purple mass with tangling, leathery limbs and more than a few eyes. I can’t even find them all. Two in the front make due enough to be the real ones. Under those, I count one massive, toothy maw. I wonder which of my other holes are supposed to play backup.

  I take a few chomps and run a tendril across my teeth. They’re pointed like ancient sewing needles carved from the bones of a caveman’s kill.

  What kind of flesh were these teeth made to tear?

  “My bones weren’t broken.” I close my eyes and tremble with a nasty cocktail of fear, disgust, and anger. “They were melted. Melted into this.”

  The flesh repeats her words. Her. The woman I once loved. Maybe still loved. Can’t recall. The flesh tells me what I knew all along.

  You’re a monster. You always were.

  [ MEMORIES ARE MERCIES. ]

  No. I remember I went to war. I don’t know why. Maybe to prove her wrong. Maybe to prove her right. Maybe just to prove something to myself. Whatever the case, I came back to the city to hide.

  Cities are man’s cheap trick for dodging his ghosts. We build them to showcase our glory. Just a way to hide.

  But you can’t hide from ghosts. They’ll chase you down alleys, follow you into bars, stare at you while you’re buying that new luxury suit.

  All the while, they whisper, their hot, nasty breath leaking into your nose: ‘You are going to die, old man. Not now, but soon enough. You’re a dog to its vomit. Lap it up while it lasts. You are nothing. You will be nothing.’

  Nothing: the god of modern man.

  Out here in the jaws of creation, I have no tricks to hide with. No distractions to protect me. No offerings to appease the urban god, to quiet his sick angels, the whispering ghosts. Out here, they don’t whisper. They scream.

  And all I can do is face them.

  “Alright. So. I’m a monster. I’m lost in space. I’m going to die with nothing to numb me along the way.” I lean back and close my eyes. “So, what?”

  ‘We were right all along,’ they say. ‘You really are a dog, Jack. You even roll over like one.’

  Hraaagh!

  I yell into the void, letting my rage pour out like molten steel.

  “If I’m a monster, so be it! I’ll yell and howl in the night like any other beast, but I sure as hell won’t die easy!”

  ‘Just a beast. That’s all you are.’

  I can win, can’t I? Maybe I’m just playing the wrong game. Fair enough. I’ll look for a new game. And I’ll win for sure this time. Or at the very least, I’ll get by. I always get by.

  I throw my tendrils back, trying to swim like an octopus, trying to move at all in the eternal, black void.

  Everything’s so far away. I can’t tell if I’m moving or not. It’s just an endless sea of stars. Stars! Stars! Stars! I’ve never seen so many. I’ve never hated them so much.

  I give turning around a try. I don’t know how or why, but it works.

  I can move. That’s something. If I can move, then I can live. By God, I’ll live.

  I take a moment to clear my mind.

  I need a cigarette.

  The stars around me seem to move now. Slightly. Slowly. That’s when I catch it in the corner of an eye. I point a few eye stalks in that direction to get a better look: amidst the glittering hoard of stardust, a white ring surrounds a solitary spot blacker than my own soul.

  Is that a … black hole? Is that a black hole?!

  My stomachs sink. All of them, like bricks tossed in a bathtub, and if I had bowels, I’m sure they’d have emptied like tubes of paint smashed by a sledgehammer.

  I throw my tendrils out in front of me. Reaching. Stretching. Straining. Trying to find anything out there to latch onto. I grit my teeth in desperate fury.

  I won’t die easy!

  When I’m finally tired of grasping for straws in the void, I decide to try swimming again.

  I must look ridiculous. Insane even.

  I take a deep breath of fresh space. I try letting my mind clear. Try letting a solution, an idea, a possibility, anything useful come to me. All I reap is all I’ve sown. A life of cynicism yields no fruit in its harvest.

  Nothing’s changed. I mean, everything’s changed, but it’s all still the same. I’ve always been a monster; I’m just not wearing a man’s skin anymore. I’m out of places to hide. Time to pay the piper, Jack.

  Hiding never helped. Hiding only made the ghosts seem to disappear, but they were always there: the rye always ran out, the cigarettes always burned away, the songs always ended, and the pretty enough dame always changed her mind about you when the hour was good and dead. That, or she just finally drove your last nerve out to the edge of town and shot it like a sick dog.

  And once you’d dug his grave and planted him in it, the ghosts, always there, would pop their heads out from hiding and coolly ask with haughty eyes, ‘How’d that work for you, Jack?’

  Well enough. Read all about it; the report is on your desk, boss.

  I got by. That’s enough. I always get by.

  I reach for a smoke again. What else to do?

  Patting and feeling about the amorphous, purple mass that is now me, I remember.

  Stop the anxious habit, you neurotic ball of slime. You don’t have any. You moron.

  Alone. Anxious. Craving a damn cigarette. There I was. The urban god and his angels staring down on me. Glaring. Mocking. Salivating like ravenous beasts that have cornered their prey. Their eyes, the glitter of stars and worlds of the void, number in the millions.

  ‘How about now, Jack? How’d all that work for you?”

  So, I grit my teeth and glare right back at ‘em.

  “I was planning to quit anyway,” I tell them.

  I will get by. I won’t die easy.

  Real or imagined, I feel the black hole draw me closer.

  It can’t be imagined. If it’s drawing me in, it’s drawing me in. It wouldn’t start and stop, only accelerate.

  That means I have to find a solution fast. The longer I take, the more certain my doom is.

  Maybe there’s no answer. Maybe all I can do is surrender…

  No one will care if I do.

  The stars lose their twinkle.

  They say Hell is other people. Maybe being alone is what I need to find salvation. Close your eyes, Jack. Close your eyes and quit glaring. Keep talking though; someone’s listening. Someone has to hear. Even if it’s just the ghosts. Dirty liars; there has to be more than nothing. I’m more than nothing. I’m something, and that’s evidence of more.

  With that, I say the only words left in my mind with any meaning: “Our Father which art in Heaven…”

  [ GET BY . . . ]

  Prayer slips into sleep. What else to do? Doze and dream. What dreams? They’re all as dead as the men I fought and bled with. Turning into a tentacle monster nailed my coffin shut, right?

  In sleep, I hope: may new dreams come to be.

  Doesn’t work. Same damned dreams. Same damned haunting memories. Ghosts of my past. Servants of nothing. Haunting. Dead. Nailing the coffin shut isn’t enough; some things must be consigned to the flame.

  [ . . . ]

  My eyes shut, and hers are all I see. Blue like the Italian Sea in summer and warm enough to drown in. Sometimes hateful. Sometimes vengeful. Worst by far: loving. They glow in moonlight above flushed cheeks. Her golden curls frame her sunkissed face, red lips begging to be embraced.

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  Lips painted. Face smeared in foundation. Gold dyed. Curls molded in an iron’s heat. Flush scraped off a pallette. Lashes drawn from a bottle.

  Only thing about that face that isn’t a lie are the eyes. Those lapis wreaths are truly hers. They’re the best liars of all.

  They speak in sweet and gentle whispers to a soft, boyish heart. Affectionate hopes of what could be. Kids running around a backyard. A home scented with baked cookies. Family huddled around a hearth. A future built by undying loyalty. Nothing about her is true.

  Forgive those eyes, Jack. Forgive them, or they’ll drive you deeper into Hell.

  I forgave her—sure I did. Laughed it off years ago at the bottom of a bottle of rye and the butt of my last cigarette. It’s the hurt that still bites my heart. The wounds she left behind. Damned things never healed.

  You’re a monster, Jack.

  Beneath the moon, we gaze into each other’s eyes. We are children by the lake, standing in the cool breeze of a summer night. I kiss her. She kisses me. A poison I can’t quit.

  I turn and run as though I have broken something priceless into a million pieces. The coals of guilt burn hot beneath my feet. An embarrassed young man.

  She chases after me.

  We rejoin the congregation. Hold hands. Watch as the church bonfire throws waves of orange light against the night blue lake beneath a stardust sky. I’ll marry her someday is all I can think.

  [ KEEP DREAMING, SOLDIER. ]

  More and more, I dream. Or remember. Can’t say which.

  First day of training as a cop. My nerves rattled my bones with delight.

  Finally able to afford a ring, a simple silver band set with a single, humble diamond. My face beamed with bright joy.

  Getting down on one knee in the lamplight of the bistro’s veranda. My sang with clarion triumph.

  Shouts of curses after getting lost driving outside of town. My throat burned hot with shouts of rage.

  I said the wrong thing at the wrong time and made myself the fool. My gut wrenched in embarrassment.

  Calling and calling for Roger, my dog, when I was a kid. I cried like a summer storm when we buried him. Never had one since.

  A man’s life is a long series of dreams.

  Rising from the muck, one dream greets me again and again between the swirl of memories:

  I’m behind the bar in a café. My café. I’m running the place like a sergeant on the line. The jazz is a lot smoother and easier on the ears than the symphony of shells, bullets, and screaming.

  My own slice of the pie. A little piece of what could have been had I never stopped caring. Here, I share as much as I can.

  The night is slow, the tempo set by the chime of careful fingers meandering across piano keys in improv. I’m chatting with a regular as I pull him his second beer from the tap. He has no face in that strange way dreams are made. I know him though, and he knows me. We get by on that, the warmth of friendship.

  Off to my left, our pianoman picks up his pace ever so slightly. His fingers bounce across the white and black keys in a slow ballet as if his heart is singing by proxy.

  A waitress—a sweet little number with a smile that could mend a cracked soul—ferries whiskeys over to a table of lost men. No grift to be played, she offers real kindness in that smile.

  “Gal like that’s worth more than a nation’s gold,” says my regular. “Too bad nobody’s wise to it.”

  “That’s why I keep her.”

  Her and the other girls. They’ve got in spades what I lack: a softness that makes you want to stick around. Something that helps you heal.

  There’s the pale barista who writes poetry about moonbeams and city lights while she twirls her black hair. She hangs on every word of the lost souls who wander here.

  The little songstress who could put a smile on a lion with her twirling skirt and bouncy spirit. She never misses a step in the beat.

  A regal blonde sears the steaks just right. Every meal she cooks is like a love letter to the human spirit that the tongue reads and the stomach ponders. Plates the food like Van Gogh: passionate and perfect.

  The dishes always come spotless. There’s a quiet little dame who makes scrubbing pans look like a martial art. Every detail’s caught in her attention.

  The café. A dream I never let breathe. Never let brake. Locked up tight in the corner of my mind like a box of precious coins and jewels.

  Now, when the dream has no chance, I let it live and breathe more than ever. Just to comfort me. That’s all it ever was. A comfortable idea.

  Not anymore.

  It’s too late now. Too late for what could be. All I have now are ‘what was’ and ‘what could have been.’ I’ll take it. I’ll take what I can get.

  The dream is warm like hot tea with a splash of whiskey, a squeeze of lemon, and a spoonful of honey. I drink it down and savor it whenever it comes, no matter how bitter the regret mixed in is. Always painful to think, 'What if?'

  What if?

  What if I’d just been a better man?

  [ . . . ]

  Space. Her freezing fingers reached down into my purple flesh, a set of slow knives that don’t care if I live or love. They cut anyway. I shiver in the broad’s cold dance, but she’s too tough to shake.

  God help me.

  [ . . . ]

  Shakespeare gave King Claudius this line that stumped me as a kid: “My words fly up, though my thoughts remain below. Words without thought never to heaven go.”

  Ideas will stick in your head like a seed caught in your teeth. Waiting for the right time to grow: to each thing its season.

  ‘How can a man lose the ability to pray?’ I’d always wondered. Now, I still don’t know the answer, but I sure know the feeling.

  “Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.”

  The icy queen shows me what my last breaths look like. I slap myself and wring my tendrils in resistance. Keep the blood flowing.

  “If I’m going to die,” I say in cold clouds that puff up around my face, “I’m dying with a clear conscience. I’ll repent as much as a man can in his last moments.”

  Hraaagh!

  I roar. I flail. All for warmth. She answers. Feeds me hope from a baby spoon.

  “I’ll claw until my nails bleed.” My breathing is as heavy as each word. “Until they start throwing dirt on me. You folded, Claudius—I’ll snarl and howl to the end. I will not die easy.”

  I drift. Alone. I listen. A different sort of prayer. The cursed hole drags me in, inch by clawing inch. Frost crawls up my back like a nest of spiders. The chill sinks into my teeth and makes them rattle. Its fangs plunge down and grip the sinews of my python limbs.

  Silence bears down. Like a vice. The weight of sins: Drank too much. Smoked too much. Could have been something. Gave up. That’s all I hear.

  Didn’t give up: broke. Dead-end jobs. A system that always takes and only pretends to give. Her. War.

  Man is born broken. Is what it is. Real sin is never trying to fix it.

  You’re a real sinner, Jack.

  Can’t help but be honest now. A monster. Always have been. Now, I’ll be one to the end.

  I wish I could have been a man.

  My body rattles. No off switch. Frost coats my back, thin as a lover’s promise.

  Time’s running out, Wolfgang. The piper wants his money.

  Why's it so hard to be something so simple as a man?

  I chose this road. I chose where to go. I chose not to care, chose to hide myself away like a boy hiding from the morning sun beneath his blankets. Never woke up, Jack. Stayed in bed all day.

  Can’t be sorry when you reap what you sow.

  Keep trying to pray. What else to do? Try to pray. Last chance.

  “Forgive … us our debts … as we … forgive our debtors.”

  My teeth. My lips. They chatter and tremble.

  Since when have you ever forgiven a debtor, Jack?

  I jolt. Regret’s electric surge runs through me like I’d wrapped a purple feeler around a live wire. A rare feeling. You get it when you know how dead wrong you were, but the past doesn’t quit tailing you.

  You try to outrun memories, outrun the ghosts. You race through the graveyard like a madman. Off to the next distraction, racing to hide behind vice or vitriol.

  I need a cigarette.

  Chase a drink. Chase a dame. Let yourself rage, throwing chairs and tables.

  Finally, you’re at your core self. The soul? Doesn’t matter. You’re staring down a tombstone towering over the grave of a better man. The one you could have been.

  The stars’ hideous, inescapable glower. The void and her cold clutch. My brain’s jackrabbit sprint. I wear down. I crack like Ma’s good china when it meets a stray baseball.

  How long has it taken? Can’t say. Without the sun’s warm glow, the dulcet creak of a ceiling fan, and clients barging in and out of a dusty office, time has lost all form. He stumbles on like a drunk with nowhere to be but down the street, all the while dragging me with him.

  I swear I hear the black hole laugh over the chatter of my teeth. That’s when I begin to hate.

  Hell isn’t other people; Hell is being alone with the person who hurts you the most. I am my greatest enemy. I am my own Hell.

  Am I dead? If I am, and this is Hell, nothing I do matters anymore. If I’m not… This is still Hell. I’d do anything to escape this. Even…

  I shove a shivering tentacle into my mouth like a frank at a ballpark. Set my teeth against my slimy flesh. I linger and breathe, gumming up the courage to face the sharp scream of drawing my own blood. My jaw trembles. Cold or fear?

  Will it be worth it? Will this take me anywhere I’m trying to go? Heaven? Hell? Home? Anywhere but here.

  I wonder if this is the sort of flesh my teeth were meant to tear.

  “Hrrrn!”

  I sink those bone needles into my tendril. My muffled scream does not relieve the pain.

  Bite harder, you coward!

  I clench my jaw tighter. My tendrils writhe wildly, breaking off the layers of frosted slime. Green blood floats out into the void. The stars twinkle beyond. The neon, verdant fluid beads and reaches for those beauteous, mocking gems. I bite even harder.

  “Hrrrn!”

  The pain overwhelms me for a moment, but I surrender not one ounce of resolve.

  I will shuffle off this mortal coil.

  Unless, you already have, Jack. Unless you’re already in Hell.

  Keep biting and find out. Either you’re trapped here, or you march into the next reality.

  Tears weep from my eyes like sweat from a cold glass of cola. Halfway there! I clench my eyelids, knocking the thin layer of fluid from their fleshy surface. When I open my eyes once again, I watch the beads of perspiration drift off into the void.

  My vision blurs.

  I bite harder.

  Almost!

  I am becoming numb. Not enough to silence the screams of my torn flesh, but numb enough to drive forward toward my proverbial cliff.

  I set the gaze of my ire to the black hole like the sights of a .38 Special. If looks could kill, I’d fire every round.

  The tendril clings.

  I chomp and hack.

  Bleed, bastard!

  Harder, I bite. Faster, I bleed.

  I shiver like a junkie in the rain, a speedball of freezing and bloodloss.

  I’m tired.

  Eyes shut, the faintest shade of red saturates my vision.

  Finally, the big sleep.

  The end is come.

  What a stupid series of events this has been. What a stupid series of events life is. At least it’s over. On my terms. The black hole didn’t end it. I did.

  ‘You’re still a loser, Jack.’

  A man’s life is a series of dreams best not dreamt.

  [ R E M E M B E R ]

  I wake up, sick and sore like I spent a night boxing fifteen rounds with a bottle and lost. An aching, stiff jaw. Every limb is stiff, popping as I stretch to bring some life into them. My mouth weeps slimy slobber around the tentacle still stuffed in it. I pull the limb out of my mouth and take a look.

  No wound.

  Pines loom overhead, black spires clawing at the starry, purple firmament. Larches and firs fill the jungle’s gaps, standing between the conifer kings like courtesans. Ferns bow at their feet like servants.

  I’d recognize those trees anywhere. I grew up under evergreens. Roger and I would run through the forests and play. He’d watch me climb those trees. When the sun was setting and we were done, we’d run home. Ma would have supper ready.

  My attempt to pass through the doors of death. Has it sent me… Home? Can’t be. Can it? Am I back in Washington?