Fiction

By Harper Kingsley

CHAPTER ONE

There’s so much water.

It’s everywhere.

Salty and terrible.

Almost worst than the blazing heat of the sun. The light so bright and encompassing. Burning away his skin one reddened layer at a time until he wondered when he would be left as nothing more than bones.

Floating forever on the ocean. Or withered down and swallowed by the waves.

His mouth was so dry. Surrounded on all sides by water, but so thirsty his lips stuck to his teeth and his tongue felt too big for his mouth.

He was dying. He knew it and couldn’t stop it.

His death was an inevitability at this point. So far from the shore that land was nothing more than a half-remembered dream to his sun burned mind.

This was the end of him.

These were the last moments of his life.

And thinking back… he felt regret for all the time he’d wasted. Enjoying his moments but not treasuring his hours. This was all he had left.

Floating far from shore. So thirsty he couldn’t feel hungry. So hot that all he knew was burning misery.

These were his last moments.

Floating lost. Hopeless. Knowing he wasn’t going to be found.


It was hot. That’s the first thing Ames realized. The horrible, all-encompassing heat.

Then he recognized the slapping sloshing sound around him: water.

He tried to groan, but his throat hurt too much. When he weakly shifted he lost his balance and slipped off the board he hadn’t realized he was resting on.

He splashed into the water. Gasped. Panicked. Swallowed a mouthful of salty ocean water. Began to drown.

Lights flashed behind his eyes. Or maybe it was the darkness cutting away the light.

He weakly tried to kick his legs, but his body was too exhausted by sunstroke.

He passed out.

And found himself in memory. Back in the hospital where he had so recently died after saying his final farewells to his tearful family and friends.

Everything had had a haziness to it from the painkillers. It had reached the point where there were no longer limits to the amount he was given. He’d held the button in his hand and could control things for himself, a little bit or a lot. It didn’t matter because he was going to die anyway.

He’d pushed the button enough to take the edge off the grinding agony. But he’d held off enough that he could coherently say his goodbyes.

It had hurt to see his mother sobbing against his father’s shoulder. Neither one of them had thought he would die first. Barely 29 years old, but so ravaged by cancer that there was barely anything left of him.

Ames had managed to smile at them. Had spent his last precious moments offering them comfort rather than focusing on the fact that he was really dying.

Some bit of him had felt resentment, but he hadn’t allowed it to show. He wanted his loved ones to remember him the way he was, not like this, wasted away in a hospital bed, full of wires and tubes, piss and shit pumped out of his body through holes cut into his belly near the feeding port that had kept him alive for the last year of his life.

His body had failed him in the worst way.

And when everything ended… It was to the sound of his loved ones weeping and the blare of the heart monitor. Then blackness swallowed him whole.

He wasn’t expecting to ever wake up. Much less on a beach. Naked.

He could tell he was naked by the pain of sunburn covering his entire body. His legs screamed when he tried to move them

His entire body felt as if it were covered by a tight leather suit that was shrinking with every minute that passed. It felt as if too deep of a breath would cause his skin to split.

He couldn’t even groan. His throat was so dry it felt torn in places. He could taste the metallic flavor of blood.

Ames didn’t want to move, with how much it hurt, but he knew he had to. If he didn’t save himself, he would die here.

He didn’t have much strength and he could feel it becoming less as he lay on the sand. The energy was being sucked out of him as the sun baked him alive.

It was agony. Every move he made was like a scalpel peeling off his skin. And below the flesh was screaming nerves.

If he didn’t have the memories of the hospital, of the sickness, of the dying… he might have given up. Might have laid back down in the hopes of passing out and dying in his sleep.

But he’d died once.

And however he’d gotten to this place, he would see what happened next. He was no stranger to pain. He could take this much and more.

He just wished he didn’t have to.

It was the dream–the delusion–of a body that didn’t hurt that kept him moving. Crawling up the beach, away from the water to the tree-line and the desperate hope for shade to bring him some relief.

He crawled. And crawled. And crawled.

And he would have cried if he had tears. But he was so dry, the moisture sweated and baked out of him until it was pure will that kept him moving. Only the fire of his soul kept him alive.

Lights and colors and strange fluttery sensations… He felt like he crawled into madness. The heat and the sunlight blazed upon him. The thirst made every bit of him ache from the surface of his skin to the depths of his teeth.

He thought his gums were bleeding. His throat was raw and torn by the dryness. His bones felt cooked inside him.

He was dying.

The sand, rough and white, was like diamonds cutting away at his skin. Scraping, peeling, digging into him.

And still he kept crawling. The delusion of coolness and relief luring him on.

The agony was proof positive that he was alive. It was a good thing. That’s what he tried to get himself to believe in his lucid moments. In the brief seconds and minutes when he formed actual thoughts and didn’t simply do.

There were stretches of time when he didn’t know why he even bothered. Heartbeat upon heartbeat of time when he had no idea where or when he was, the very concepts of beach and sand and sun made meaningless and unknown by a brain that was frying inside a skull covered by hair and sunburnt scalp.

This was death and dying. A complete transcendence of being.

He was on an impossible endless journey of unmaking, and if he reached the other side he would be reforged into something new.

Or he would unravel completely. And all the bits that made him him would catch fire and melt away, leaving only carbon residue. Unrecognizable and unrecognized, lamented by no one.

He would be like a smear on a water glass: wiped away.

.

Time had no meaning. There was only the distance between him and the shade.

He didn’t even know what he would do when he got there. How he would deal with his raw, burnt flesh. How he would alleviate the terrible and deadly thirst.

All he knew to do was crawl. It was endless forward momentum.

His eyes had gone dim and his ears were filled with a rushing sound that drowned out the sighs of the ocean. His heartbeat was a pendulum. A drumbeat. A vibration through his blood.

He was dying, but he was still alive. For now.

/END CHAPTER

Heroes & Villains at Amazon

A ONCE MIGHTY WIND

He’d felt like a god once. He’d walked the earth and been able to imagine it tremble beneath his boots. His voice had shaken the air and everyone had shown him nothing but awe.

He was old now and feeling older everyday. His once mighty voice had been diminished to a whisper, easily ignored by the children that surrounded him.

Everyone seemed like a child to him now. He was older than he’d ever wanted to be. And with every passing day he only grew older, weaker and more bowed by time, his body failing him while on the inside he felt the same as he’d always been.

He’d felt like a god once, but now his health was failing him. Time was catching him up and he could no longer outrun the sunset he felt closing around him. The tiny aches and pains that had added together to become a dragging misery.

The bones he’d broken and treated carelessly as they healed were now a deep throbbing agony when the weather turned cold. The scars that had slashed his flesh now stood out against skin gone paper thin and they twisted tight and sometimes felt as though they would tear themselves open again.

He’d grown older than he’d ever wanted to be. Some part of him had somehow assumed that he’d reach a comfortable age and time would cease to bother him. Yet here he was, an old old man, long retired with no more battles to fight. Not because he’d won the war, but because the war had moved beyond him. Taken out of his hands by the young heroes that had taken his place.

He hated that he had become defunct. He’d lived the most when he’d had an enemy to fight, but now he’d lived so long that his body had failed him. Had lived so long that he’d outlived his ability to fight.

He could still feel the power within him, that well that waited to be drawn upon. But his lungs had failed him—too many cigarettes back when he had smoked—and now the doctors warned that using his metability would likely kill him. His body was too weak.

He thought about damning the consequences and the solicitous advice. Imagined sometimes opening his mouth wide, drawing in a deep breath, and BLOWING as he once had done.

That mighty wind that could topple buildings and push the weather where he willed. He could still feel it deep inside, but his body was weak and broken by time.

He imagined drawing on that power one more time. Fantasized about showing everyone that he was still here, still existing, still a god amongst men.

But time had taught him fear. Time had taught him dread of encroaching death. Time had made him greedy; miserly over the few short years of life he had left.

He wasn’t just tired of the pain he felt. He dreaded adding hurts to the accumulation he was already forced to carry.

Time had bowed him down. Time had brought him a humility he had never thought to know. Had knocked him from his pedestal and made him merely human.

He’d felt like a god once. A long time ago.

=END =

Fortress in the Eye of Time at Amazon

MEMOIRISHU
by Harper Kingsley

The worst part of being crazy were the moments of lucidity. The moments of looking around and realizing "This is all really happening. You are this person. This is your life."

There’s a pleasantness to disassociation. To being able to tell yourself that you are currently existing in a dream. In a vision. In a moment of some much better life.

But this is all real.

And that’s the cutting edge of sanity.

Or maybe those moments of "sanity" are when you’re craziest of all.

It’s hard to think about. In the complete THISNESS of it all.

You don’t remember your name most of the time. It’s not the name you call yourself in your head. The name that’s printed on some birth certificate far away in the home you barely remembered but wanted so desperately to get back to.

You live in the moment. Make the best of the situation. Don’t make waves.

You smile and you nod, and life is mostly all right. Not anything to dream about, but nothing to feel ways about.

You don’t know where the reference came from, but it felt right. It felt like something you’d heard and briefly been amused by and yet it somehow burrowed its way deep enough into your mind that it was able to pop up when after everything else had been forgot.

A lot of things had been forgot.

A lot of the parts of you have been forgot.

Tenses, twisting and bending, carrying you along in a melody of "That looks sort of right/it must be right"-thinking that at the same time felt like you were an alien standing in a room. As though a thousand-thousand people are all looking at you and shaking their heads, "No."

You have references inside you that you don’t know how they got there. Thoughts left behind by some other life you were desperate to remember while fearing the kind of person you might have been.

The things you know. The terrible (wonderful) destructive things you know that are so perfect for this place. That would change the face of everything, though you don’t know if it would make things better or worse to think and do.

You know so much without knowing where you’d learned any of it. You don’t know if any of it is real, or just nonsense you read somewhere and inexplicably retained when everything (someone) else was purged from you.

TBC…

For reals, yo, if you shop on Amazon, please use my Amazon shop as a gateway point. I’m pretty sure I get money if you do that. And, you know, I do sometimes find cool(ish) things to share at https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.

All Systems Red at Amazon

My brain is a formless nothing. A resounding rhapsody of the kinds of sound that would make someone hold their face and SCREAM.

From that nothingness, planets are formed. Swirling out of the greater void. Bathed in the twinkle of stars popping into existence one after another, like specks of ink on a page.

Drinking from the well of life. As something was birthed from nothing and All came into being.

Rasping breaths on a midnight silhouette shore. Drawing in every bit of air that could be breathed, tasting the unique flavor of a brand new world.

I had been trapped in nothing for so long, smited there by a vengeful god that I still hated with the deepest fire of my being.

My father. Rasmandius. The Demon King of the Greater Underworld. Lesser Prince of the Farthest Hell.

The cruel dictator of my imprisonment. The one that had sentenced me to the void for daring to defy him.

Yet here I am. Birthing myself anew from the nothingness, now that the very memory of my father is long gone.

"You did not win," I said, knowing that he was too far to ever hear, but needing to speak nonetheless. "I did not let you win."

I stand on the earth of a planet in a universe newly born, and I smile.

It is my time now.

/END

"Killing It" on Peacock: The first season ends on a cliffhanger!

If there’s one thing I wish American shows would do, it’s emulate Korean dramas in giving is the whole of everything at one time.

I want a show to wrap up the story. Make those 12 or 20 episodes, rather than feeding us little rabbit scraps and expecting us to be satisfied with less than we want.

But anyways, the first episode of "Killing It" was funny, which gave me a different impression of the show than it turned out to be.

That shit is heavy as fuck, yo.

I watched the whole first season because I’d already started it, and it’s a good show, though I need to have the complete thing, and I wish it wasn’t broken into seasons or whatever they’re going to do. I mean, for all I know they’re going to cancel the show and that first season is all there’s ever going to be.

For serious: From the first episode I was expecting (hoping for) a much lighter show than I got.

I was expecting him and her to pair up, and they would hunt a bunch of snakes, and they would win the competition and he would start his business and it would be a big success, flowers and butterflies, happy endings all around.

Instead it’s very bloody and tense. Definitely not the vibe I thought it was going to be at the end.

~Harper Kingsley
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog
https://twitter.com/harperkingsley0
https://paypal.me/harperkingsley
https://kimichee.com.
https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.
https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.
https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.