The Serpent (a Dez Marlowe story)

It had all started with Orson, the homeless veteran that had turned out to be a Djinn. Dez had drunk from the bottle of ambrosia, tilted the bottle to his lips and drank deeply. The liquor had tasted of honey and sunlight, it had tasted of ancient power and impossible dreams. Dez had taken the bottle home with him, gulping it greedily, hearing Orson's voice in his head: Not so fast, boy. Powerful, ancient stuff that is, the drink of the gods. It'll do strange things to you.

Dez didn't listen, drank the whole bottle. He'd woken up months later in Cairo, Egypt, wearing a keffiyeh and the robes of a Bedouin, speaking fluent Arabic. He bore scars on his body, knife-wounds, teeth- and claw-marks. The last time Dez had felt an overwhelming desire to do something he couldn’t explain had been in a rare bookstore in London. He had come across an ancient volume and felt these same sensations. Dez had opened it and the words written on the first page had seemed to wriggle, to twist slightly. He stared at them and found himself unable to look away, found himself falling forward, pulled into the lines and curves of the runes, heard a hum in his ear that weakened him, a low haunting melody that entranced me hypnotized him, caught him like a fish on a hook. Dez had tried to pull away, in vain. The harder he struggled to close the book, the deeper he fell into the runes, the more entrancing became the melody in his ear. He was at right turns to reality, his name, his identity was sliding away, his present was draining into the book and he could do nothing to stop it. He had been saved my a hand gently but firmly snatching the book away.

“That’s a right dangerous tome, that is. Best put it up, I should.” The man had looked into Dez's eyes with a penetrating gray stare. “You’ll be fine, I expect, but I’d not go poking into strange books like this no more, if I were you. There’s things out there hidden away in books, things you may not like, things old and powerful, things dangerous and real, whether you believe in ’em or not.” He tapped my shoulder. “This here isn’t all there is to the world, this flesh and blood and bone.”

There had been other books after that, other cities and other warnings. He met strange people, a woman with a voice that sang songs in a voice echoing back on itself in bizarre harmonics, a girl-child that traced the lines on his palm like a fortune-teller and where her fingertip touched him the creases ignited into painless flame, and she spoke to Dez strange and unbelievable prophesies. He ignored the warnings, hunted the books that spoke to him in whispers and songs, found them in the oddest and most obscure places on the map, traveling all over the globe on his savings and trust fund and inheritance, when that ran out working odd jobs that left him stranded in strange cities for months until he could afford to move on. He never sent post cards, never wrote or called, for he had no one to write, no one to call. Each book led another, following clues from the text like a detective. The books and scrolls and codices were always in the same script that seemed at the first and second glance to be utterly alien and bizarre, then after a few minutes of study, seemed to inexplicably shift and writhe, to rearrange into words he could read.

Then came the Scroll of Hours, as he began calling it. He used it to win the lottery, in a small Midwest American town off of I-80; he used it for a myriad of purposes, some innocent, some more nefarious. He never rolled back any more than a few hours at a time. Some silent voice in his gut told him to peel back Time too far would be dangerous. He tried convincing himself that he had watched Back to the Future too many times, but he couldn't shake the feeling.

He hadn't banked on the intervention of Fate, however. Or whatever it was that happened. An accident maybe. He was hitchhiking on a two-lane highway in Missouri, he had sat down a few dozen feet away from the road under the shade of a massive, spreading oak tree. The scroll, even after months had passed, still pulled at him, still called to him from the case in his bag where he kept it. He found himself, there under the oak tree, pulling it out and looking at it. He hadn't planned on opening it, really. He had no agenda, nothing to do with its weird power. He was just holding it in his hands, staring at it, letting it's subtle call wash over him. It was the snake that had caused the whole mess, a giant python or something, an anaconda, a huge constrictor of some sort. At first he thought maybe he had fallen asleep, or was having a flashback...but it slithered up to him to him from out of nowhere, just suddenly lifted its head from the grass and stared at him with slitted eyes. He was frozen for a moment, transfixed to the spot by the piercing yellow alien gaze. He felt strange, inhuman thoughts, like Orson's voice in his head when he drank the ambrosia, but the voice was scaly and cold and and slow, its thoughts ancient and incomprehensible. The snake moved closer to him, flickering its tongue out, so close it brushed his boot. Dez leaped to his feet and pressed his back against the wall, the scroll held in one hand...

One end of the scroll left his grip and fell to the ground. Dez watched it happen in slow motion, swearing under his breath even as it hit the ground, and rolled away from him. The scroll was open several feet now, and the snake was wrapping itself around him, coiling him in inescapable bands of steel. It didn't constrict, totally, just held him immobile with its head inches from his own.

Stupid human, he heard it say, silently. Stupid, foolish, blind human. You meddle with matters far beyond your comprehension. It falls to me, of course, to rescue you from your own idiocy. You are truly like a lamb wandering amongst a pride of sleeping lions, blithely unaware of your own folly. Close your eyes, human. When Dez failed to obey, the rings of iron around his body tightened in warning. Close your eyes! To watch a few meager hours roll away is well and good and harmless. If you were to watch as hundreds of years flow in reverse you would rip away layers of your psyche. You have already done irreparable damage yourself.

Of course, Dez looked around him. The constellations whirled and span and jumped and gyrated, the sun and moon circled, day and night alternated in pulsing strobe-light flashes. Trees shrank and storms raged for violent microseconds. Dez felt something in his head warp slightly, and he squeezed his eyes shut. What is done is done, and cannot be take back. The Scroll of Hours only functions in one direction, but you wouldn't have thought of that. Dez had, actually, considered that, and that was one reason he'd never experimented with longer periods of time.

Then things got truly strange. Dez felt the coils of the serpent that wound around him heat and melt, fuse with him at an atomic level, felt the ground tremble and heard the heavens roar like a rushing wind, heard the stars sing in angel voices, heard the thoughts of millions of people crashing in his skull in a telepathic deluge. Panic hacked at his soul, confusion and disorientation and fear distilled in his gut in a harsh burning concoction and all Dez could do was keep his eyes shut tight and hold to the fragmented train of his own thoughts that were drowning in the welter of sensation amid and within him.

The serpent's voice returned, and now instead of seeming alien and frightening its voice like scales on rock comforted him. Keep calm, now. As you have wrought this, so you must bear it.

What's happening? He asked​​ it.

It is not explainable in human language. I have brought you outside of time, into a place that it...between.

Between what? Dez had an image of being plucked out a rushing river and suspended above it.

Your mental image is not far off. To think of it thus will not lead you astray.

Who are you? He asked the serpent. What are you?

Nothing you would understand. As a child cannot grasp the complexities of the adult world with its abstract concepts and tangled issues, so you cannot grasp what beings exist beyond your ken. Leviathans writhe in the spaces outside the streaming of time, monsters lurk in the dimensions beneath your reality. And you, in your hubris, have plunged headfirst to swim amongst those creatures. I am one of them, but unlike many others you will encounter, I will not devour you.

Why are you helping me? The fear of the unknown that had Dez in its grip escalated with the serpent's talk of leviathans and monsters. He had always thought himself a rational, un-superstitious man who refused to believe in what he couldn't see or touch. The last months, however, had cured him of that. And now here he was, outside of Time itself clenched in the coils of a serpent that Dez suspected was far more than a simple snake.

If you were driving down a highway and saw a little child tottering on unsteady legs between the rushing cars, would you not stop and help it? The voice faded then, leaving Dez alone in his mind and full of questions.

He opened his eyes, slowly, and what he saw sent his brain reeling dizzily. All around was darkness, black and void, pierced by points of lurid light, bright and blinding pinpricks in the darkness, as if the stars up close were not balls of burning chemicals but holes in a curtain across the brilliance of eternity. The light emitted cast shadows across the universe, monstrous shapes that lumbered and scuttled and slithered, shades that may have evil and darkness given substance, or may have been the true shadows of creatures beyond imagination, horror and nightmare made real. There was no orientation of up and down or left and right, no surface at all, only beings, things carving through the darkness like eels in the deepest corners of the ocean. Dez moaned, shut his eyes, but it was too late, he had seen what lay beyond, and it had seen him, the darkness itself seemed to possess a will and a hunger and now it had his scent in its nostrils, it had the tang of his blood on its tongue and the shapes were the darkness, the creatures were the talons stretched out by the slavering dark all around him, the blackness that licked his skin, lapped at the pools of his soul. He shivered in the grip of the serpent's coils that were suddenly separate from him, untangled from the essence of him and were again silken steel cables imprisoning him. He was grateful for the serpent now. It tightened around him relentlessly implacably until he passed out of consciousness.

When he awoke again he was lying down. He drifted slowly upwards from slumber out of the tangled shreds of nightmare that clung to him like cobwebs. A dream, it was all a dream, he thought. You would be so lucky, came the serpent's voice. He lay still, taking stock. Everything seemed to work, but he was stiff and sore, like he'd been in a fight. The serpent was stretched out next to him, easily thirty feet long and almost a foot in diameter. I could not return you to your native time and place. At least here you have the possibility of survival in some semblance of normality.

Dez sat up and looked around. It seemed a normal enough place, could've been an old growth forest in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon or somewhere like that. But as he looked around more carefully, he noticed several significant details that told him this assuredly was not Oregon. There were trees, or things like trees, towering around him. They weren't trees though, they were like like god-sized flowers, green smooth cylindrical trunks hundreds of feet high topped by bursts of colorful spreading foliage, massive petals of vivid blue and purple and green and yellow and orange and colors Dez didn't have names for. The flower-trees were odd in another respect: they weren't rooted in the ground, but instead were anchored to earth by a few wisps of white thread-like substance, so that the whole plant drifted loosely, like a boat tethered to a dock. The whole forest moved in syncopated swaying harmony, a hypnotic world of color and motion.

“Where are we?” He asked out loud.

“We are...I do not know if I can explain it. Another dimension, another time and place.” The snake was speaking out loud, and its voice sounded precisely the same as it did in Dez's head. “It is like the fantasy stories you read as a child. We in a place that is a long time ago and far, far away from anything you have ever known. It is the only place I could find that bears any resemblance to your home. It is vastly different, however, and it will tax you sorely to adjust. I cannot stay here any longer. Good luck, Dez Marlowe, and goodbye.” The serpent writhed itself into a knot and burst into the air, transforming as it rose, turning into something like a manta ray but translucent and the size of a passenger jet. It pulsed itself once, refracted the sunlight that passed through it into a rainbow that bathed the world in color, then vanished.

Dez sat stunned and staring at the strange new world around him as a welter of emotions rioted within him. Eventually he stood up and started walking, picking a direction at random. He'd been walking for what felt like half an hour when he felt the curious sensation of being watched. He stopped, suddenly sure that someone, or something, was nearby and watching him.

“What are you?” A voice came from high above him, lilting, musical, high and feminine. Dez looked up. The creature above him was definitely a female. She clung to the stalk of the flower-tree about twenty feet up from the ground, one lithe arm wrapped around the trunk, the other pointing some sort of weapon at him. She was bipedal, appeared to be about six feet tall, with green skin a few shades darker than the stalk of the tree. Her hair was pure white, long and and fine and flowing in the ever-blowing wind. She also had long wings appended to her back, two sets, thin and pointed like a dragonfly. She leaped to the ground, flitting her wings lightly to slow her fall; she landed on her toes and circled Dez warily, her weapon, a short, thin, straight length of tubular metal, looking for all the world like a pistol. Whatever it was, whatever it did, the way she kept it pointed at him made Dez positive it was a weapon of some kind.

“My name is Dez,” he said.

“What is a...dez?” She asked. Despite the fact that he understood what she was saying, Dez had the distinct feeling that they were not speaking the same language, but he couldn't explain to himself any better than that.

“Dez is my name, it's...how you call me. I am a person...a human.”

“Ah,” she said. She lowered the gun, or what Dez now thought of as a gun. “Well, human named Dez, you should not be here. This is not a good place. You must come with me.”

“I must?”

“Yes. You are my prisoner. Unless you wish to be no longer living?” Well. In trouble already. Wonderful.

A Fragment of Youth

Local bar low-ceilinged and loud
Kitsch and Christmas lights in April
Drunks laughing and dancing to the deafening band
God this song brings me back 15 years
To when love wasn't really love at all
Just tingling fingers and long glances
Mush and nonsense from innocent kids
New and strange and exciting
When responsibility was a four-letter word
And all we knew was
Long car rides and your dad's jazz stations
Playing just loud enough to cover our conversation
Then he changes the station and this song plays
And we sing along in low voices
Just whispers in the summer wind
And I hear this song now
So many many years later
And I swear for a split second
I'm that kid again
It's a strange feeling
A fragment of youth and innocence
Briefly superimposed over maturity and age
Like a lightbulb suddenly burned out
Leaving an after-image of the room as it was
Then the song ends and the moment is banished
I shake my head and drink my beer
Let the moment the image
Float back down the swift torrent of memory

The Scroll of Hours (a Dez Marlowe story)

Dez Marlowe found the scroll in a glass case of a curio shop. It was unassuming, a simple scroll of vellum next to a rusted dagger, some arrowheads and old coins and a scratched silver cigarette case. The proprietor of the shop—a balding man, skeletal, parchment-like skin, smoking a long cigarillo—could only say that someone had sold it to him many years ago, for one hundred dollars. He had given it a cursory examination then forgotten it until Dez walked in and saw it. “I’ll let you have it for one-fifty,” the proprietor said, “I don’t have any idea what it is, or what the writing on it means. It could be rare and valuable, it could be a list of farm tools. I had a linguist look at it once, a few years back. He said it was no language he’d ever seen before. So, one-fifty, and good luck.”

Dez asked to see it, and as soon as he had it in his hands he knew he had found what he was looking for. The scroll felt heavy in his palm, heavier than reality, whispering to Dez in a susurrus audible only to him, he knew.

“Don’t you wanna open it first?” The shop-owner asked.

Dez shook his head and left, holding the scroll close, cradling it against his chest. “Weirdo,” he heard the proprietor say as he left. Dez didn’t know how to tell him what he was feeling as he held the scroll in his palm. He couldn’t define it himself. He was afraid of it, drawn to it. He had crossed continents looking for scrolls and books like this.

He walked down the street to his car and drove back to his hotel room, glancing at the scroll sitting on the passenger seat, waiting for him to unroll it. Dez resisted. Setting it gently on the bed, Dez kicked off his shoes, sat down next to the scroll, reached for it, stopped. Not yet. The desire to unroll the scroll was beginning to dominate his thoughts, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t know what the scroll was, exactly, but he recognized the feeling it engendered within him, the sense of premonition, the warm tingling creeping sensation like static electricity crawling up his flesh when he touched it. He had found several other texts like this one. He always found them in small, out-of-the-way bookshops and antique stores. None of them were ever the same, and few had ever amounted to much. He was searching for information that would explain what had happened to him at that bus stop back in Detroit. So far, all he had discovered was a plethora of legends and myths and stories about Djinns and Ifrits, but next to nothing that would truly explain the terrifying, incredible being he had encountered, or what had happened to Dez in the months since then.

In the hotel room Dez opened his newest acquisition a few inches. The markings on it were a mixture of Arabic cursive lines and dots, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Hebrew runic shapes. Dez stared at the shapes, trying to make sense of them and failing. Then the writing began to blur and shift, as if Dez was staring at it too hard, yet when he looked away and back down, the markings were still trembling and distorting. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head, pressed his fingers to his temples, yet the bizarre writing only increased their inexplicable dance. Nothing like this had ever happened before in any of the texts he had found to date. They had all been in Arabic and he'd had to have them translated. He'd thought the tingling warmth when he'd held them had been his own excitement, but now he wasn't so sure.

Dez rolled the scroll closed, stood up and went out to the balcony of the hotel, lit a cigarette and held the scroll in his hand, staring at it and wondering what it would do.

“Screw it,” Dez mumbled to himself. He clamped his cigarette between his teeth and unrolled the scroll, waiting for the glyphs to rearrange themselves. Around him, the evening air grew warmer. He unrolled the scroll further; the sun seemed brighter, somehow, despite the late evening hour when it should be setting. He looked up, and noticed a few odd details: a few souks, which had been closed for the day, were now open, a shadow cast across the market square by building had moved backwards across the square. Dez glanced down at his watch: 6:59. He was been sure the alarm clock in the hotel room had read 7:15. Maybe not. It had been a long day, and the sweltering heat of Jordan had taken its toll. Dez dragged on his cigarette one last time and tossed off the balcony, opened the scroll further. This time there was no doubt...

The sun lifted upwards in the sky, shadows rolled and lightened, crowds swirled and reversed in time-lapse, the watch on Dez's wrist counted backwards, 6:36...6:12...5:56. Dez slumped against the rail of the balcony, light-headed, still holding the scroll open. He pulled it open an inch further, and instantly time rolled back even further, his watch now reading 5:35, the sun well above the tops of the buildings now.

“What the hell?” Dez looked down at the people beneath him, but none seemed to notice anything amiss, scurrying across the square and along the streets as if nothing had happened. Maybe it hadn't, to them, Dez realized. Dez returned his gaze to the scroll held open before him. The words were now intelligible to him, some sort of prayer or incantation. He scanned the text visible to him, but it didn't say anything about time, only the will of Allah and the words of Mohammed to the faithful.

Dez rolled the scroll closed and as he did so time snapped back to its original moment, before he'd ever opened it, 7:16 p.m.

This could make things interesting.

Spark of Apocalypse

It all started with a girl, as so many things do. She was young, beautiful, curious, slightly naive and idealistic, and such women have been the downfall of nations. So proved this woman to be. She had a name, once, something ordinary and forgotten. Now, her only name is Pandora. This Pandora, like the one from ancient mythology, opened a box and let evil loose upon the world. Only, this Pandora was the box. The evil she loosed wasn't contained in a clay amphora, no, this box was far more commonplace: the human mind. In the oldest stories, Pandora was given a sealed jar and told not not open it under any circumstances. So, of course, consumed by natural curiosity, Pandora opened it. When she did so, out rushed all the evils of the world.

This new Pandora was a chemical engineering major, back when such quaint things as universities still existed. She found a way to do something incredible, like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Alfred Nobel. It had been said that people only used 30% of their brain, so this girl, being young and idealistic, found a way to unlock that elusive 70%. She tested it on herself, being young and naïve. She was right, in that she unlocked the rest of her brain using her chemicals and compounds, and she was right in that she found herself capable of things far beyond imagination. People had theorized in books and movies what would happen: telekinesis, telepathy, empathy, perfection, terrible and wonderful things.

Terrible, and wonderful, indeed. Telepathy, telekinesis...yes, she discovered these, and found them to be burdens; the weightiest burden Pandora unlocked was immortality. She created the ability to put off sickness, invented regenerative techniques to stave away Death's specter, she developed all this, and more. But, like the ancient Pandora, what she opened couldn't then be closed. She took a lover, our postmodern Pandora, a courageous, foolish man, and together they conceived a child, and that child had control over its entire brain. And so it went. Children born thereafter were able to do nearly anything they wished...except exercise restraint.

The purpose, it became clear, for that millennial restriction on the human brain was to protect mankind from itself, to protect men from themselves and each other: nearly infinite power, but no understanding of the forces wielded...the result was apocalypse. Not by nuclear holocaust, or melted polar caps, or meteoroids, but because of one ambitious girl who thought she could unlock the mysteries of the human brain. So then, men murdered each other with bare hands, with lasers and plasma rifles and fission bombs and empath hunters, with hate and hunger and overcrowding.

See her now: stumbling across a blasted plateau, bare feet catching on bleached bones buried in the soil, hair thick and youthful still, lovely face unlined by age, yet heavy and haunted with grief. She carries in her gut the thickest of gall stones: the knowledge that she wreaked this havoc, she created this hell, the road to which was paved by that commonest of stones, good intention. She cannot forget and she cannot die, while her lover lays long rotted in the wind-scoured soil, her descendants stare out from caves in hillsides, lope through empty streets of skeletal cities, gaunt and gangrenous apparitions. Pandora, who carried in her synapses the spark of Apocalypse, now wanders Earth trailing the ghosts of mankind behind her in an ethereal skein of sorrow, palpable to her senses as voices singing elegies and curses to her ceaselessly. She weeps, and regrets, but she cannot close the box she has opened.

A Farewell Silence

The loft was cold, dark and quiet in the predawn hours. The man lay on his back, one arm underneath his head, covered to the waist by a sheet, a woman next to him on her side facing away from him, hands underneath her cheek.

Neither was asleep. The pillow by her face was damp, her brown eyes glittering with slowly trickling tears; the man, thin and hard-muscled with black hair touched by silver at the temples, sighed. It was a long deep sorrowful expulsion of breath that spoke of grief, wordless and knife-sharp.

“Maybe we can—” he began to say.

“No,” she cut in. “I can't...I just can't go through that again.” She shook her head gently.

“Well, maybe we can just wait a few months, and then when we—when you—feel ready, we can try again.”

The woman rolled over to face him, laid a thin delicate long-fingered hand on his chest, familiar and loving. “No. I'm sorry. I...I just can't.” Her face was like her hands, thin, delicate, beautiful in a fragile, angular way. “Please try to understand, Mark. I've wanted this more than anything, to be able to give you this. I know how much it means to you. I love you, so much. I just...couldn't bear to lose another one.”

He reached his free hand up and pinched the bridge of his nose, wiped his face as if trying to scrub the riot of emotions away. “Melanie...” He turned his head to look at her, hard sad features softening. “I know. I shouldn't even ask you to. I couldn't bear to lose another one either. I feel like something has been torn out of me. Like I was given my deepest desire and had it snatched away again.” His composure crumpled abruptly and he rolled away from her, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes, almost savagely.

Melanie shifted closer to him, pressing herself against the length of him, wrapping an arm around him. “I feel the same way, believe me. More so, if anything.”

“I know,” he said, heaving another deep shuddering sigh. “I know. It's just not fair. Why us? When there's so many people out there who don't even appreciate what they've been given? They take it for granted, like it's so easy.”

There was silence for a long time, then. Finally, Mark rolled over to his back once more and she laid her head on his chest. “So that's it then,” he said slowly. “I feel like I'm saying goodbye to someone, you know? Someone I've never met...never will, now.”

“Please...don't talk like that. It's not fair. You know all too well how to get me all twisted around, talking me into things, arguing and turning things upside down, and making it all so...dramatic and...final, I guess.”

“Isn't it though? Dramatic? And final?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so. I just feel like when you talk like that that you're trying to persuade me into trying again, without sounding like you are.”

“I'm not, I promise. I'm not gonna lie though. I do wish we could try again, but I know, in practical terms, that neither of us can emotionally endure all this again...the joy at first, the hope, the excitement of the plans and buying tiny little clothes in blue or pink, and cribs and diaper bags and...and then the agony when you lose it...him...or her...that unbearable, wrenching pain of loss...”

“Oh Mark...” she sobbed against him, shoulders shaking.

“I’m sorry, I have to get this out, Melanie,” he said, his voice low and heavy, barely controlled, tremors and trembles at the edges. “I'm the last of my family, you know? Dad died last year, Mom when I was a kid...they were both only children, and their parents were gone before they even met each other...I have no one but you...I just want to leave a legacy...a baby to carry on some part of me...it doesn't even have to carry on my name, I just want some portion of myself to go out into the world. I feel like if I die some spark will be extinguished. You have your brothers and sisters, and nephews and nieces, and your mom and dad and everyone...but you're all I have. I can't risk you again, I can't...there was so much blood this time, I thought I was gonna lose you and I couldn't survive that...If I lost you I'd just stop breathing, heart-broken and dead inside. But I've wanted a baby for so long...”

“I know you have...and I've tried so hard to give a baby to you. We've tried everything Mark...and we've lost them all. This time was the worst, making it to twenty weeks...And it gets worse every time for me, physically.”

“I'm not blaming you. How could I? I know you want this as much as I do. I guess I'm just grieving, because I know we just have to give up.” He groaned, a ragged growl of heartache. He didn't say anything for a long time.

“I'm saying goodbye,” Mark said, finally. Melanie couldn't respond, she could only clutch harder to him, kiss him through her tears. Outside, the sun had fully risen, welcoming a new day. The loft was quiet then, filled with a farewell silence.

The Djinn (a Dez Marlowe story)

Dez Marlowe adjusted the earbuds and shrunk lower in the bus seat, trying to block out the garbled babble of the drunk old man sitting behind him: “Hasn't it, hasn't it. Coming, coming, soon damnit. Not enough time, it's all busted flat. Cave in. Where's it all going, where's it all going. Have's and have not...”

Dez thumbed up the volume on the iPod, but still couldn't drown him out. It had been a long day in a hot, greasy, loud restaurant kitchen. Two stops left. What a pain in the ass the guy was. Every night for the last week he'd gotten on with Dez and sat behind him, mumbling and babbling. The bus lurched to a stop, let a few people on, let a few off, then rumbled on and finally halted at Dez's stop. He stepped off and stood in the lee of the shelter to light a cigarette. The wind was sharp and cold, cutting right through the black-and-white checkered chef pants and hooded sweatshirt.

“Not yet, not yet...no sir, I don't rightly know where he's at...who's there? It ain't me, no no no...” Dez glanced over his shoulder, sighed in irritation at the sight of the old man, a few feet behind him. The old man wore several layers of clothes: tattered, stained sweatpants under ripped, baggy jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts, flannel shirts, an old army jacket with the name “Orson” stitched on the left breast, two purple heart medals on the right. He had a battered army rucksack on his back and untied combat boots on his feet. He stumbled closer to where Dez stood, bumped against him, smelling so strongly of liquor that Dez felt queasy

“Gotta smoke, buddy?” The old man tipped sideways, caught himself against the enclosure. The hood of his sweatshirt fell back and revealed a wrinkled, weather-beaten, scraggle-bearded white face wearing dollar-store black sunglasses. Dez fumbled in his pocket for his pack, pulled out two. The old man snatched them, stuck one his lips, the other in his coat pocket. “Thanks, pal...smoke 'em if you got em...” the old man mumbled around the cigarette as Dez lit it. “Don't let 'em catch you nappin', boys, they'll drop you quick as that...them bastards are sneaky...they'll pop you drop you smoke you while you're smokin'...watch your left, got some Charlie comin'...” he kept a steady stream of words flowing even as he inhaled and blew smoke from his nose.

There was something about the old veteran, though, that had Dez's fine hairs standing on end. He could feel the old man's eyes on him, a steady, searing, lucid gaze palpable through the sunglasses that he wore despite full night around them. Orson smoked slowly, savoring it, cupping the cigarette in his hand, hunching over it greedily.

“Your time has come, Dez Marlowe.” Orson's voice was suddenly sober, steady and stentorian. “The Other-natured seek their own.” As he spoke, Orson seemed to swell, to gain muscle and stature, becoming brawny and ram-rod straight and rigid and noble. The words he spoke echoed, reverberated in Dez's chest, in his brain, in his spine. “We will find you, always find you, wherever you may flee...” Orson's eyes became visible through the tinted plastic lenses, glowing blue like lightning, like fire. Luminous and bright, Orson's eyes were like miniature stars, emitting such heat that the plastic sunglasses on Orson's face were melting, softening into liquid and dripping down his face in rivulets of black magma, then burst into flames, a brief flare-up that died instantly, leaving the wrinkled leather face bare. Dez felt fear and panic bubble into his blood and course through him, and he stumbled backward, bumped against the back wall of the bus-stop shelter.

“You can't get away, Dez Marlowe,” Orson said, his words sepulchral and echoing through dimensions. He took a single step towards Dez and reached out a hand that wore fingerless gloves, grasped him by the shoulder in a grip so fierce that Dez fell to his knees hissing and moaning in agony. Waves of heat pulsed through Dez, singeing his essence, his identity and soul. “Don't fight it, boy. I'm setting you free. Let go.” Dez realized he had been holding on to something, desperately clinging to his death-grip on reality, and now that was being scorched away; he had been cleaving tenaciously to it for so long now, for an eternity, and Orson—whatever he was—had ignited it and Dez knew he had to let it go. Dez sucked in a breath of cold November night air and gave in. Seconds passed but the pain and searing heat inside him didn't fade, but blazed even hotter.

“No more...please..” Dez pleaded, weakly.

“Look at me,” Orson commanded. Dez obeyed, unable to resist. Orson stood over him, no longer gripping him now but holding him up gently. Only it wasn't Orson anymore, but a man-like creature, a fearsome thing of flames and smoke, writhing and flickering and shifting from visibility to invisibility, through dimensions of which humankind had no conception, taller than skyscrapers.

“What are you?” Dez asked.

The thing smiled, spoke in Orson's voice. “I am a Djinn.”

“A...djinn? Like a genie?”

“Pfah!” He—it—spat in disgust. “A thing of stories and silly games. I do not live in bottles and I do not grant wishes...not as you might think. I grant deepest desires, unspoken needs. This is your unvoiced wish, granted.”

With that, the Djinn named Orson burst alight, consumed by hungry blue flames until nothing was left but the bag-wrapped bottle of booze on the bench. Dez pulled himself onto the bench, took the bottle and drank, discovered not beer or wine but some exotic spirit tasting of honey and sunlight and starsong, soothing his soul. Ambrosia, came Orson's voice in Dez's head, drink it.

Dez drank. Some barrier within him was gone. Something inside him had been let loose, and Dez had no idea what it was.

THE INTERSECTION OF LOSS & DESIRE

A delicate freighted silence looms between us, a train of moments boiling with a complex amalgam of emotions. We sit across from each other at a small round table, the sounds of a coffee shop swirling around us: chattering voices, milk being steamed, Miles Davis. Her head is tipped down so her black ringlets curtain her face, luminous jade-chip eyes downcast, sad and thoughtful. She lifts her white porcelain mug of green tea to her lips slowly.

“This isn't working,” she says. Her voice is low, musical, lilting. I love her voice. Even now, as she tears herself away from me, her voice is melodic and lovely, every word sung sweetly. “I'm sorry, Jack, I care for you, but we're just not right for each other.” I hear her cliche words, I know what they mean, and I feel the ache, the cutting wrenching embarrassing heartbreak they bear, but I don't want to acknowledge their truth. Her eyes, when they meet mine, tell the rest of the story. They are distant. She is already gone.

I mimic her by sipping my coffee, searching for the right words in response. I look at her, trying to capture a last image, and I sink into a white-capped swell of memories:

Lush soft pale skin pressed hot against mine, curves and graceful rhythmic pulses of ecstasy, her spine arching above me as she utters a low breathless moan, whispering to me in the muzzy calm of the afterglow; her hand dry and warm in mine, red smiling lips I love to kiss.

And there she goes now, walking away from me, her swaying hips hypnotic, and I am left hurt and stunned and still burdened with an aching desire for all of her.