January Story

  Once upon a time there was a house. It stretched to the sky it seemed. It had ramparts and overhangs. The front faced a large expanse of grass, overgrown now. An iron fence surrounded It on all sides, spikes on the top. A gate was set in it, only opened for delivery people to drop their parcels off. When those delivery people came they left quickly. Nobody stayed near the house for long. Even on the sunniest days it felt overcast. It felt cold. Like a storm was coming, like clouds were hunting you and if you just looked over your shoulder it would pounce, forcing you to the ground and unable to move, where you'd feel yourself wetted and drenched with rain and sleet and cold. In this house lived a man and his wife. They lived there all their days. They were well respected in the town around the house - they had money and they bought their respect with miserly disbursements of money. People stayed away. Neighbors might hear a noise from tie to time. It came from inside the house bu...

There's more to this story, of course. Read a longer example set in this world in The Lovecraft War, available on Amazon for kindles! Buy Now

  It started this morning. Well, it started in earnest. The ground outside the store seemed to drift apart again. I saw a tree floating into the air, away from me. I don’t know how much longer I have. I am continuing to write because what else can I do? Maybe things will come back together but I don’t think so.  What is that saying? “ Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”. I don’t think that the center is holding anymore. I think that whatever is happening broke that center.  I just saw a… leg? Trunk of the largest tree ever? I don’t know but I saw it land on the ground, shake everything like an earthquake, and then lift up. Whatever was connected to it, it was too big for my tiny brain to understand. I think this is the last day. I miss the world. I miss my online meetings and my normal life. I think I miss sanity, I don’t know. But if this is it, I miss other people. I miss Erin I guess.      If ...

  How quick can a society crumble? 14 days ago the world made sense. By the 14th the world just didn’t work anymore. I saw a rift tearing itself through the ground outside. But it wasn’t a rift. It was like the world itself was slowly losing coherence. Like it just didn’t want to stay together anymore. I thought back to that first tweet. That first youtube video and that first facebook message. I am not sure if they were what did this btu they were the contagion that made it possible. None of this would have been possible if that thing that had made those messages hadn’t been able to promote his message worldwide so easily. So easy it was to exploit a urge for the world to make sense again. We had all felt it. We all knew things were spiralling even before the messages started. But it hadn’t really fallen apart until one thing could gather followers by way of those poison tweets and videos. We were divided but those messages had been the hammer on the fault line of our coll...

  1 I slept that morning. I dreamt of a thing. It was as tall as a mountain, tentacles in place of a head, three legs. I dreamt of something else, bat wings spreading across the sky, slimy squirming masses making up the lower half of it’s head. My eyes popped open. I think I awoke screaming or maybe it was just the sound of the two things walking the earth in my dream. The other man turned to me. “You saw them. The gods at war.” I got up and walked the aisles again, grabbing food. Doing anything other than thinking about what I had seen in my dream from moments before. “Grab some coffee. Two cups.”, The man said. “We may as well get cozy.” I did as he asked. 2 Thunder. I think it was thunder. I looked out the window and saw the sky darken as if a cloud the size of Everest were passing over the store. Then the sky brightened again - but I could hear the thunder receding into the distance. I turned to the man and asked, “What is glee?”  He sat there, smile still ...

  1 I woke up and saw Erin was no longer in the lobby. I looked out the front window and yesterday’s message had been wiped away. I can’t lie. I knew what decision Erin had made. I didn’t blame her. And I knew my time limit for making a decision was over. I wondered if the attack would come quick. I could only hope that it’d be fast. 2 By noon it started to occur to me that maybe no attack was coming quickly. I wondered if I ought to leave - the car was still there. I stood up and shook the pins and needles out of my legs. I didn’t have any more change to grab food out of the vending machine so I paced. Finally I decided to go to the car and find someplace else. Not someplace safe, I knew I was watched everywhere, but somewhere… else. I drove for hours and saw nobody on the road. I turned on the radio and immediately words in a foreign language were being said to me. I tried to make it out, it sounded like a droning chant, the words almost familiar. But I couldn't unders...

  1 We woke up at the same time. And that was when we saw the message. It was written in blood on the front window. Backwards so we could read it without going outside.  “Want to pursue your glee yet?”, was all it said.  I stood there, mouth open. I looked at Erin and saw her reading it. Our eyes met. “Maybe we should think about it?”, Erin said. I didn’t know what to say. I know I was shocked that she’d consider it. It must have shown on my face. Erin walked over to the front desk and sat on the floor, putting her head in her hands. “It was that morning you found me, they came to my home. We’d been arguing, arguing for a long time. Felt like years. The week before I’d asked for a divorce. We didn’t love each other. Or we did but we didn’t love each other in the way we used to anymore. I don’t know. You know how it goes - you meet someone, you date, you fall in love and then you kinda drift apart over the years. We’d been married for 5 years at that point and I ...

  The next morning I awoke with a start. I was terrified I’d wake up to see a mob of people bearing down on me. But the lobby was empty. I looked around and saw Erin at the vending machine. “What are you doing?!!”, I whispered. “Don’t worry. I think we’re safe. I saw a pack of them pass by an hour ago but they didn’t even glance at this place.” she said over her shoulder. “I’m not sure that’s any insurance they won’t attack.” I said “I have a theory. I think that they are done with the violence for right now.”, she said, coming back to me with a pack of peanuts for both of us. “We’re gonna have to pool our change I think soon.” I looked at her eyes. They were wide and exposed the fear behind her act of nonchalance. I wondered if maybe some part of her was still in shock. I knew some part of me was. I took the peanuts and ask “Why do you think that?” She sat down next to me and opened her package. She seemed to think about it and then said “Because they control things now. I...

  1 I drove through the night. In the morning my car was getting low on gas and I started looking for somewhere to stop. I saw a gas station in the distance and slowed, worried about what I’d find. I stopped in front of a pump and got out, looking around for any onrushing hordes of insane people. I had decided to call them “Insane”. It seemed to fit. How wrong I was. Nobody was there. It was eerily silent. I filled my car with gas and started to get back in when I heard Erin. It was only a whisper but I could hear it. “Are you one of them?”, was all she said. I looked everywhere but couldn’t see where the voice came from so I called out “No, I’m safe.” She immediately poked her head out from behind a tree. “Don’t speak so loud. I don’t know if any of them are near!” And that’s how me and Erin started traveling together. 2 We drove through the day. There wasn’t much to do other than talk. “What do you think is happening?”, I asked. “It’s the internet stuff. That twit...

  1 This was the day the first violence started. I was brewing coffee - even in those days of waking up feeling that something was coming I needed my coffee - and I heard the crash.  I turned around and saw the stone lying in the center of the room, the broken window. I felt like I was in a dream, walking to it, picking it up, turning it in my hand. I didn’t know what to do. It was the size of my fist. I looked out the hole in my window, where glass had been only seconds earlier and saw nobody… but someone had picked it up and thrown it. I grabbed my phone and realized it was broken. I couldn’t call the police. I’d given up on landlines years ago. So I picked up my keys and got in the car to drive to the police station to make a report. 2 I saw more as I drove. A family of three - man, wife and young daughter were being dragged from their home. I only heard snippets but “Please, we are happy as we are” filtered into my car. I wanted to stop, to help the family but as...

  1 Nothing happens immediately. Everything takes time. But 8 days? Eight days to the end of everything? Eight days before I started to see bodies torn apart and the world end? That fast? No. Obviously not. None of that happened in Eight days. It was eight days of tweets, sure. But it was eighty years, eighty decades, eighty centuries of pent up worry and anger and hatred that led to it. Nothing happens immediately. 2 The sixth had been scary. I get that it doesn’t sound scary now. Now that I wrote it down I know that it might seem like i am placing too much emphasis on it. But.. But it wasn’t just a person at my door or a group of people on the street. It was that I knew, deep down, that it was the beginning. The beginning of what, I didn’t know at the time. I just knew it was the beginning.  Jan 6th 2021 was scary because we all saw on TV people attacking the capitol. It doesn’t escape my notice that Jan 6th 2022 was the day it went viral. 3 On the 7th, I opened ...

                 That sixth day of the new year. The year we were supposed to have it all together finally. That sixth day. Even now, with the benefit of time between then and now I hesitate to discuss it but I have to. I have to talk about it because if I don’t I won’t be able to talk about the rest.                 Day six was the day that the tweet arrived. “Those who do not accept my advice are traitors.” I saw it. I want to say a shiver went down my spine but at that point, after I had found that I could not unsubscribe to this account, my spine was no longer able to shiver. It was permanently stiffened in worry. And regret, there was a bit of regret for even looking at that first tweet for the beginning of the year. I looked out the window and saw people roaming the streets, looking down at the phones in their hands. Some people were gathering in small groups and others were solo bu...