A-Sides Read online

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  From Someone in the World, by William X.

  “Faceless, formless; cause without reason, shape without form. Neon lights sear my brain, branding my thoughts. Too hot, oh, terrible heat like a burning sun.

  Forces connect, electrons energize, and chemicals synthesize in fissionable thought. Pulse in my temples. Too strong. Pounding and pounding, expanding and whirling. Blood and brains and guts hurled into a bowl of electric blue like an inverted dome. Never again will I... will I... will I... what?

  “Will I die? Will I explode? With every fiber of my being will I feel the death of you? Will my brain explode and litter the universe with threads of blue and yellow memory?

  “Who are you with diamond eyes so bright they sparkle like crystal beneath a desert sun; a boiling, black sun that shines terror, not light, into my soul? How it yearns to be free, to break from this cage of gristle and flesh.

  “Are you death? Do you feel my blood slowing, settling, turning to jelly, to stone, to rust? It hurts, doesn’t it? It feels like the end of everything; such an explosion that on the day the warheads fly and turn the earth into a flaming pyre of molten concrete and vaporized metal it will seem like a firecracker in a tea cup.

  “I feel it all; I feel it more. I feel it like the mediums and the Welsh Sin Eaters. I feel it every day, yet I still want my life. You are a thief and a coward, never showing yourself in a fair fight so that I can take your bones and grind them to powder that will spread over the earth. But will there be blight? Or Famine? Or Drought? I don’t know, but my life is mine.

  “It is mine!”