I didn’t ask to find this bullet, nor did the heavy-framed revolver sitting under my pillow ask to carry it.

Even so, the facts remain that I did find it, and that the gun will carry it, and both of us will walk these gin-soaked streets until we discover who it belongs to, until that poor sod lays bloody and broken and dying, never to understand what roll of the dice or spin of the cosmic wheel led us too him.

I hope I don’t know who he is, and if I do, I hope that whoever forgives souls like mine our sins, decides to finally let me burn.

As I lift the smooth, chilly scrap of copper and lead into my palm, some part of my brain I can’t touch — can barely feel — tells me where I must be, when I must be. It doesn’t mention who this bullet belongs to, but why would it? I’ll know when it’s ready for me to know.

Bullets are coy that way.

The first one I met, along with its gun, when I was still very young. My beard was a dusting of twisted, light-brown hairs that peppered my face at odd angles.

I was trouble — troubled, and one day I found myself staring at it, almost invisable, sitting at the back of six inches of steel — carried by a sweaty, vacant looking man with bad skin and worse teeth, who thought that it belonged to me.

When he pulled the trigger, the bullet refused, the gun clicked once — then a half-dozen times — before I wrestled it from his hands. When I turned the bullet on him, it flew straight to its mark, as only those who have found their true homes are want to do.

I think his last words were, “Thank you,” but I could be wrong.

I found more bullets after that, always where one would least expect to find them — at the bottom of a tumbler of Whisky, or balanced on the back of a crab scuttling its way down a sandy beach.

When I found a bullet this way, I couldn’t help from picking it up, and each time I did — I knew that very soon — maybe in a few hours, maybe a few days, someone was going to die.

The bullet would kill them.

And I would never know why.

They always knew why, and I guess that’s what matters.

The thing about bullets is that they have this way of getting what they want, and they always take care of their own, that’s why I wasn’t surprised when they decided to make me rich.

It all started when my beard had finally grown in. It was harshly cut, that I can’t deny, but it was dark and distinguished and it suited me.

The man, I would later find out, was a small time gangster with a larger than average nest egg. He killed and raped and robbed from the poor to give to himself. The bullet I carried ended his life on a Saturday afternoon in May. I found it while cleaning out the little gas stove in my dingy, downtown apartment.

At the time, the bullets that I met, wanted me to find them homes inside of people who even I thought deserved them. I was a young man. I was still trouble. I was poor. I was happy to oblige.

I barely felt anything when I pulled the trigger that time, and I felt less and less each time that I pulled it afterward, until I was very rich indeed.

Years passed in this way, and there came a time when I stopped finding bullets, and instead I married a woman who I loved and who loved me, and who made me happier than I’ve ever been.

We had a child, a daughter, I named her Annabella after a song I once heard.

Her eyes were a shocking green, so unlike her mother, so much like mine.

For a long while, longer than I deserved, Annabella was heart, my life, she taught me to feel. That, of course, was when I started finding bullets again.

This time, however, they wanted homes inside of people I couldn’t imagine deserved them.

One bullet wanted me to find a doctor, a woman who might have made a mistake once, but who — thanks to that bullet — would never be able to find redemption.

Another showed me to the house of a police officer who had accidentally killed a man while on patrol. He died on his front porch, crying out to me for forgiveness, as if somehow he knew why this senseless violence was being wrought on him.

It was the child, however, that broke me. The where and when and how of that bullet isn’t important. What is important is that I lost my wife, my fortune and my Annabella in the bargain.

They were still alive, but I no longer was.

Before this, thanks to my daughter, I had felt every squeeze of the trigger.

After, it was a long time before I felt anything at all.

I moved out with my heavy-framed revolver, and left them to find something better.

It was during this period that I discovered something odd. When a bullet found me, it always left a body, but never a scrap of evidence connecting me to it. I would read about these deaths, watch as my macabre little collection of corpses piled up in newspaper clippings and on television broadcasts, and wonder how I could possibly still be free. Why men in sharp suits with guns and bullets of their own hadn’t kicked in the door to my once again dingy apartment, and taken me away to pay for my crimes.

After years of thinking like this, the only reasons I could come up with were that the bullets took care of their own, and were jealous of other guns.

Still, I grew tired of waiting around to be hunted, so I decided to run.

I decided that if the bullets were going to find me anyway, I didn’t have to make it easy on them.

Once or twice, I even considered turning myself in, but I guess I was too much of a coward for that.

And who would believe me anyway? And how dangerous would it be for them if they did?

Bullets take care of their own.

Running helped for a while. For a while, I was free again.

Much later, there was an afternoon when I was walking down a long, black road. My beard had grown scraggly by then, knotted and damp from sweat. I looked like the sort of person who, when I was a rich man, I would have stared at and wondered how he could possibly have let himself go like that.

Now I knew.

It was on that road where I saw something familiar glittering in the scrubs and the dust. Something I thought had left me alone once and for all. It was a bullet, and it wanted to lead me back home.

I don’t know how many bodies it took to bring me back to my apartment, how many corpses stood between that afternoon and this morning. All I know is that there is a place that I need to be, and a person that I need to see, and that when I look into her eyes — eyes so much like mine — I will show her the bullet in the back of my gun.

My only hope is that the sound that greets me after I do, is a click.

Then a sound.

A voice.

A tinny whine the volume of a mouse and the tenor of a miracle.

“Kitty cat, kitty cat, let me in. Broken face and busted chin…”

“You’re an ass Marjorie.”

“I’m all you have kitty.”

“If that’s true, I really am lost.”

“We’re all lost. You and I just get to choose the maze.”

“You call this a choice?”

“As much as any. Speaking of which, it’s time for you to make yours kitty. Tick…”

“No!”

My voice comes out in rasps. There is a moments pause, but only a moment.

“Don’t be stupid kitty, you’re running out of time.”

She is always so reasonable, and always so right. I hate her.

“I can’t…”

“You can.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“You can’t make me!”

“You’re right, you always have a choice. Tick…”

The final word hangs, growing fetid in the sickening, sweet air. Finally, a voice not entirely my own groans a response,

“Tock.”

I look out through eyes the orange-red of hellfire. Colored contacts grown cloudy by misuse.

I blink too often. I smile a smile that seems to have clawed it’s way out of a Stepford Homemaker catalog. There is a door in front of me. I open it because it’s the right thing to do, and as such will infuriate Marjorie.

Two men stand in the center of the room. Heavily muscled shoulders covered in thick leather, faces pocked and marked by a lifetime of choices. They look up, look right through me for an instant. Then they call out a name — Brittany or Tanya or Sara or Allison. It doesn’t much matter.

I walk over to them and exchange a handful of words for a package bound in crate paper. I can tell they aren’t happy to see me. I can tell they just barely see me. I no longer mind. It is, of course, just instinct. By the time I step back out into the warm, wet air of the mid-afternoon I’m forgotten.

Once outside, I follow some road and then some other, half a dozen disappear behind me in the span of an hour. Sweat beads at my brow.

There is a tension in my steps, a tension in the way my hands swing back and forth, a taut purpose I didn’t know I had left in me.

There is also anger there.

Anger and raw, bald contempt.

My footfalls contain worlds.

Soon enough I arrive at a low, dark building, pristine in its dilapidation. I stop at the entrance and exhale slowly, running through a checklist that is by now branded into my cells.

I check the doors, I check the windows, I make an obsessive, calculated search of the perimeter. I find nothing. No trip wires or pressure plates. No snipers nests or disturbed earth. No cars. No smell of ash or ichor, gunpowder or humanity.

You can never be too careful. Marjorie can be a real bitch.

I step towards a side entrance, hidden from the road and it’s streetlights. I pull at a heavily rusted lock and it comes apart in my hands. It’s not happy to see me.

Inside, the factory is an altar cast in browns and blacks, and has all the solemnity of an abandoned graveyard. Machinery lays crippled, broken by time and rust and decades of grinding work. Somewhere, somewhere nearby is my goal.

The package grows weighty with purpose. I wonder what’s inside, what could possibly be worth all this, I’m rewarded for my concern with a searing pain behind my eyes.

It’s not our place to wonder.

Instead, I close my hellfire orbs and sway, listening to sounds that have no interest in being heard, dull echoes etched in concrete and glass. Voices that may never exist, secrets and oaths unsaid. Somewhere in the cacophony is a single sentence that sets me moving.

I continue my search, opening doors and pushing aside rotting furniture. There is something ennobling about all this. Something about work, grime, exertion that always thrills me. I cut my hand on a jagged edge, and a thin line of red draws an uneven arc down the remains of a wooden desk. I watch it, glowing it’s soft, nearly imperceptible glow — like a precursor to a ritual, a beacon in the darkness. There is power here, I realize. I’m close.

“You never fail to disappoint kitty cat.” That voice, soft and cloying.

“How?” Mine, cold with contempt.

“The roof.” Her reply, disaffection trained to an art form.

She was right though. I had forgotten to check the roof. Stupid. Always so stupid.

Marjorie glides towards me and strokes my face, her hands are ice cold — even when everything else changes, that never does.

“You’re too late.” I hiss, stepping away, nearly tripping over the pile of debris behind me.

“That’s where you’re wrong, kitty cat.”

She places one hand in front of her, palm up. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to what I’m seeing, and my brain longer to translate it. How do you describe an absence? How do you make meaning of void? Still it was there, we both knew it, and both knew what that meant.

“You already found it.” My words tinged with more resignation than intended.

“I always do.” Hers with precisely as much mirth as she had.

“No…” I make up my mind.

“And what are you going to…”

Before she has a chance to finish, I drop the package. As I do, the air around her bursts into flames. The heat is unbearable, a thick cloud of jet black smoke rises from every scrap of wood that gets in it’s way. The metal scars and buckles. The building shutters. Small explosions can be heard where long idle machinery comes in contact with the inferno. Nothing is left unmarked except the package, and the two of us.

“A little much, kitty cat?” She stares at me, one eyebrow perfectly arched.

“I learned from the best.” I stare back, a trace of a sneer forming on my lips.

“Isn’t this where you start running? I’m a sport, I’ll give you half a days head start.”

“Not this time Marjorie.”

“Oh, I see.” She pauses, then starts laughing, “That’s adorable kitty cat! But of all things, fire? Shouldn’t you have tried something a bit less…useless?”

I hate her laugh, I always have. Fortunately she won’t be holding on to it for long. The concrete was buckling, the air was boiling. I savor the moment, swirl it around my tongue before swallowing hard,

“How long do you think it will be before this building falls on top of us?”

Realization draws over her face like a death veil.

“You wouldn’t…”

“You might be surprised.”

“If we both die…”

“I know Marjorie.”

“Then what in the hell are you thinking?”

It was a good question. I consider, watching rafters tear away from their moorings.

“I’m thinking that I’m tired. I’m thinking that it’s exhausting fighting for a world that doesn’t know I exist. Most of all I’m thinking that if you’re the only person in the universe who will ever understand me, I’d rather be buried under a thousand tons of concrete.”

Marjorie is many things, but she is no idiot. She knows me, better than any one person has the right to. She knows when I’m bluffing. She also knows when I’m willing to give up everything for the opportunity to spite her.

And today…

“You’re insane.” Her laugh is a memory, and her smile has dissolved as completely as the void she holds in her hand.

“Don’t look so glum, if we die, you win…it’s on a technicality, but we take what we can get, right?”

I can barely see Marjorie through the haze, there is no going back now, this building is coming down. Whether we are standing here when it does is all down to what Marjorie says next.

“OK, OK kitty cat, no need to do anything crazy. What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“Of course I know what you want…Learn to take a joke.”

“Shut up Marj.”

“Whatever you say kitty. Get the package.”

The flames slide harmlessly over my skin as I reach into their core to draw out the package. Funny, not even the crate paper is scorched.

“Would you hurry up, we don’t have all day here.”

I hated Marjorie’s smile, but her scowl, I could see that every day of my life and be happy, no matter whose face she was wearing.

I stepped towards her and that shard of nothingness she held in her opened palm. I whispered words that slid out of my mind as completely as the fire did off of my skin. I realized then that the package gave off a soft, silvery glow. Had it always? It’s impossible to know, and the more I thought about it the more I regretted thinking. Instead, I dropped the package into Marjorie’s hand.

We stood and listened. There it was. Somewhere, in the boundless infinite, was a new voice — one that may never have existed until now, tiny yet achingly meaningful, drowning out the cacophony. Soon enough it would soften, another thread in the tapestry holding everything together.

“Great, good. You win this time. I’m so happy for you.”

“Is losing that hard for you Marj?”

“You don’t want me to answer that. Can we go now?”

Wooden rafters are falling in great piles. Even standing less than a yard away from Marjorie, I can barely make out her features, still I know what I would find there if I looked and it thrills me.

“I’d be happy to.” And for the first time in a very long time it was true.

I reach out to her, wrapping her hand in my own. She squeezes it before intoning.

“Tick.”

And using a voice that is already not my own, I reply,

“Tock.”

“Sounds good.” His eyes meet mine, a moment passes, then another.

“‘Sounds good’? Are you listening?” I watch his attention drift towards his Lobster Bisque.

“Yea, I’m listening.” He adds, lifting the spoon to his lips.

“Then say something!” The spoon hangs suspended between the bowl and his half-open mouth.

“I would if I knew what you were talking about.” He tastes the soup, unimpressed.

“I want to be fiction!” I repeat, punctuating each word.

“You mean like, write a book or something? Don’t you already do that?” He sets the bowl aside, losing interest in the luke warm broth.

“No! Not write fiction, I want to -be- fiction. Fictional. Like Hamlet.” My cheeks grow hot as I push myself out of my seat, throwing a twenty on the table.

“So, you want to be an actor now?” He watches me leaving, confused, the rest of our food hadn’t arrived.

“Yes. I want to be an actor!” I scream.

When I was five I wanted to be a cowboy, until I learned that real cowboys were dirty, smelly, angry people who died young and had Syphilis. Turns out what I really wanted to be was the Lone Ranger. He didn’t have Syphilis and knew how to take a bath.

“I want to be fiction.” I offer, casting my gaze towards the wall length mirror.

“You want to be what, darling?” She says, folding a scarf, fire engine red and nearly transparent, not so much clothing as a talking point.

“I want to be fiction. I want to have adventures.” I hate the way my shirt looks. I unbutton the first button, exposing a tuft of unruly hair.

“Adventures? We are going on one right now, silly, two weeks in Paris, it’s, it’s like a dream…” She eyes a pair of pants, sliding them into the half-full suitcase, then moves towards my side.

“That’s, not what I mean.” She stands between me and the mirror, tiny fingers on tiny hands drifting across my chest.

“Then what do you mean, my love?” Pale green eyes meet mine. My breath catches in my throat.

“I, I want to be remembered…” She mimes assent as she snaps my button back into place, smoothing my shirt out with a flourish.

“Don’t we all.” Red lips brush across my pale cheeks.

As I grew older I thought I wanted to be a writer. So I wrote. I created the sorts of worlds that I wished I lived in. The more I did though, the more I saw the joke spelled out in my prose. What would my shiny, perfect, painfully interesting characters do with dumpy, balding, shy around strangers me? I did the only thing that made sense, I burned my notebooks and quit my job.

“I want to be fiction…” My words, a pathetic slur between burning draughts.

“‘Course you do. Who wouldn’t? I used to direct movies, ya know? Met a lot of guys like you.” He waves the bartender over, ordering two Whiskey’s, neat.

“But I’ve got a plan!” The final word barely audible.

“Right on, right on.” He slides one amber glass in my direction.

“I’m going to be bigger, bigger than this life…” The room tilts sideways, eyelids weigh down my face.

“Yup. Knew a lot of guys like you in the business. It’s a hard road man, hard road.” He drops a few bills on the counter and stumbles to his feet.

“You don’t believe me…” I can’t quite make out his face anymore.

“Not a whole Hell of a lot I believe, but I wish you luck all the same.” A blurry shadow moves towards the door.

“Remember my face!” I snap, pawing at his wraith with half-clenched fingers.

“Sure thing, pal.” He fades away.

In the end the solution was obvious.

“I want to be…”

“Shut up! Just shut the Hell up.” The room was cold and damp and smelled of antisceptic.

“But, I just want to be…”

“Unless you want a goddamned bullet in your head, you’ll stop saying that. Do you even know what you did?” Droplets of warm saliva hit my face, I could vomit.

“Of course I do, I am not stupid.” His fists clenched. Another man, a well armed man, put a hand on his shoulder.

“I just don’t get it…” He says, regaining his composure.

“Apparently.” I replied. My wrists were starting to chafe, my eyes beginning to water.

“What I don’t get,” ignoring me, “was why you did it?” If I could move my arms, I would have strangled him to death.

“Perhaps you should learn to listen?” I said instead.

“You killed your wife!”

“Yes.”

“And your best friend.”

“Correct.”

“And some poor bastard who didn’t even know you.”

“Three for three.” He was turning red again.

“You’re going to burn for this.”

“I would certainly think so.”

“And you have nothing to say?” A thought crosses my mind.

“Do you have a comb?”

“I’m done here. Get this asshole away from me. We have our confession, if he doesn’t want to clear his conscience that’s on him.” The well armed man and two of his friends drag me towards the door.

A camera bulb flashes as we step out into the crisp, night air.

Another door opens. My heart beats, then races, then leaps, then screams. I stand, frozen. Not frozen but waiting, waiting for disgust to catch up with terror. One step. Then all is chaos, hurricane force and absolute.

Thought retreats. What remains are wet lips and soft hands. In an instant I’m lost. I want to be lost! In her, in this moment, in the small death that comes before new life.

I gasp. Whiplash shock pulls me upright. The world spreads beneath me, the ground rushes towards me. Chaos settling into perfect clarity. Beauty, warm and lingering.

Like a glance. A smile. Like words exchanged, punctuated by laughter. Like a chance meeting that changes everything. Like…

I land.

I need Osaka.

Solutions are slippery things. Too often we try to catch them head on, we sharpen our spears and stalk our prey and wait for the perfect moment to launch that fatal, visceral strike, blissfully unaware of it’s twin sneaking up from the shadows — all top hat and twirly mustache — ready to tweak our noses.

It’s why cleverness can kill, it blinds us to the obvious; draws hard, plan-shaped lines around the limits of our awareness, seducing us into denying complexity while all the while setting us up for the same old cosmic standup routine. It’s also why most solutions are best approached at an angle.

Angles are my bread and butter because hunting solutions is what I do, it’s at once my vocation and my career, the reason I get out of bed and how I afford the bed in the first place. I take my job very seriously. I once sat for twelve hours staring at a wall looking for a solution. It wasn’t there. The wall was there, of course, but the solution, that had gotten away from me. I found it two weeks later while falling out of a plane at something approaching terminal velocity. There is a lot of clarity in falling out of planes, and some pretty sharp angles.

Solutions require angles. Finding angles comes down to developing effective ways to be less stupid, which can be tricky because as human beings, stupidity is our birthright. Many millenia of slow, meticulous evolution has seen to this — helping to wire the impossibly complex meat we live inside into a nigh-perfect (by our standards) instrument of self-preservation and replication. Unfortunately, the same tools that are so brilliantly adapted to keeping us alive and breeding, are not, despite our most ardent wishes, designed to be windows into anything resembling the universal truths we like to think ourselves capable of sussing out. It’s why I need Osaka.

I once met a man who thought the world was going to end in three weeks. It didn’t. I saw him again a few weeks later, and he still believed that we had three weeks left on the clock. That seemed odd to me, so I asked him what had changed, and he replied that nothing had. “Three weeks is three weeks,” he informed me. I agreed. He nodded. He’s still out there today and eventually he will be right.

People are bad at thinking about things.

We are especially bad at thinking about things we don’t understand. We are unspeakably bad at thinking about things we believe we understand. We believe we understand everything, which doesn’t bode well for a society that increasingly requires that we think subtlety and understand brilliantly. That’s why my efforts as a problem solver have lead me to a single, effective strategy to overcoming this flaw in our programming, and that is to assume I understand nothing and work actively to correct that.

That’s why I need Osaka. Perspective is the arch-enemy of stupidity and travel is perspective careening through the sky at 30,000 feet. I figure if I look around hard enough and long enough and talk to enough people in enough broken Japanese that by the time I get back I’ll be marginally less stupid, and solutions will have a harder time playing tricks on me.

You might be saying at this point, “Nameless stranger, that’s quite a price to pay for perspective, will you be bringing along your gold-plated Butler or will you be leaving him on the private island to take care of your collection of bespoke formal-wear?” First, Conroy doesn’t like planes. Second, questions of money almost always come down to questions of value. What you choose to value and what you don’t. I just happen to value some things radically more than others.

Some people like new shoes or new cloths or new anti-matter reactors for their rocket ships, I turn my government sponsored chits towards buying jet fuel and searching out meaning machines, wonderous new adventurers to make my life seem less drab. If that means that my boots and my warp drive have a couple of extra holes, so be it, I need Osaka more. Equally relevant, I care about how money works, and respect it enough to get to know it intimately before bandying it about like a tart. It seems odd that we know so much more about how to spend money than how to save or invest it, it’s like a middle school love affair, all tongue and no tenderness. That has always seemed so crass to me.

Back to problem that led me to Osaka.

It’s not my first. It’s not even my first today, and the details of it are less relevant than the words that brought it to me, “What is worth changing here?” It’s a question and a calling card, a kind of emblematic statement of purpose emblazoned upon my psyche. It also really annoys my friends. I ask it everywhere — at the gym, on trains, when I’m trying to learn how to spot weld, and when people call me at 3AM because they’ve been locked out of their flat and need a shoulder to cry on. Ask that question enough and you’re bound to end up with quite the menagerie of solutions waiting to be found.

Solutions that hate cleverness. Solutions that require angles. Solutions that are laid bare by perspective and by knowledge, that chitinous exoskeleton that gives perspective its form and stability. Solutions that I hunt because I am a hero and it is the only truly heroic act left, the kind of mundane, achingly beautiful heroism that seeks to perfect the world not by torrents but by drops, building its effort into a current that can drive us all into a better future.

I do this all because I am you.

I am who you are and who you could be. I am the hero in the corner of your soul — alive, radiant and dancing. I need Osaka because knowledge and the solutions it brings are worth fighting for and right now, at this moment, Osaka is the spear, catching slippery solution in the throat as it creeps from the shadows. I do this because I know, we know, that there are problems we were meant to solve and that the wild hunt has begun.

Nine. The cauldron is important, it can’t be too deep or too shallow. Iron ore is preferred but steel or aluminum will do in a pinch. The important thing is that it’s clean, spotless.

Eight. Cool spring water is best, but any liquid that boils past 100 degrees will do. I’ve known practitioners who used herbal tea or Chai. I’ve even known one, trapped in the field, that made use of a half empty bottle of Pepsi.

Seven. Bring the liquid to a rolling boil, the toad essence can be tricky, and should be added last–lest it burn. No one likes a burnt essence.

Six. After twenty minutes, the dry ingredients can be added. People underestimate the importance of dicing, there is nothing quite as good as finely grated rats tail to get the cosmic energies flowing.

Five. Stir vigorously until your mixture becomes a paste. Since there are a number of liquid ingredients, you may find it difficult to tell when its finished. A good rule of thumb is that you should stop stirring when the brew smells faintly of lavender.

Four. Now it’s time for the fun part. Find yourself a ceremonial knife (your favorite butter knife doesn’t count). While traditionalists work with cold-forged iron, some don’t have meso-american temples to do our shopping in. For the rest of us, a gently used pocket knife bathed in moonlight for a week will do.

Three. Now dip your knife into the paste and spread it across the length of the blade. DO NOT use your hands! While this goes without saying, it’s amazing how many practitioners end up wandering dazed and confused through the nation’s infirmaries because they were too cheap to invest in a pair of gloves. If you do accidentally touch the mixture, immediately soak your hands in a 50/50 mixture of rose water and common, household bleach. Wash until all residue has been removed.

Two. Leave the blade in the noonday sun for at least one week. Patience is a virtue young practitioner, because without it all you have created is an extraordinarily dangerous piece of sharpened metal. Many practitioners will spend an extra week with their knives, hoping to make them safer. This is fine up to a point, but you run a constant risk of dayglow (where the ceremonial blade begins to shine dimly in low light). If it works at all, a dayglowed blade will always be less effective and more unpredictable.

One. If you have completed all of these steps, you will be the proud owner of a brand new Hephaestus focus, perfectly suited for transformations, divinations, evocations and even light necromancy. Practice these simple instructions and you will be transforming Princes into toads in no time.

“Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

Scene: three candles, three children, all perhaps 15, all curious about the worlds beyond their charcoaled eyes.

“This is sooo boring Cindy. Why can’t we ever do anything fun?” Words ringed with the whine of the self-satisfied. Cindy leads this junior coven, her symbol of office the cheap, plastic Ankh hanging round her neck. Stacy, the bored girl, is Cindy’s first Lieutenant. She sits sullenly, her voice pitched to the edge of mutiny.

“I don’t want to hear it Stacy, this is way more fun than anyone you’d be doing right now.” Her lips the color of fresh blood and laced with venom.

“You mean David?” Rachel said, whispered. She was quiet, mousy, a body designed to be ignored. As she drew out the name David, Cindy nearly choked on her laughter, a rare bit of validation.

“Rachel!” Stacy bleated.

“She’s right Stac. If not for us, you’d be sitting around complaining about your ‘baby daddy’ by now.” Southern drawl serviceable for a girl who had never gone further south than Newark, and whose experience of its culture didn’t extend beyond sweet tea and Georgia peaches.

“Would not!” Stacy rebutted, stupidly.

“You’d be fat, with your hair all in a bun, waddling around that apartment of yours wishing you had friends like us to tell you to buy a rubber.” Stacy scowled, Rachel nodded and Cindy smiled a smile that said she wouldn’t mind seeing that happen.

“You’re full of it Cin…” For once, Stacy was right. Despite David’s many, many protests, Stacy was as chaste as driven snow. It was a little sickening, but I’m biased.

“Don’t believe me? How about we find out?” Her fangs were dripping. Last summer, Cindy lost her virginity to an older counselor at a summer camp. Since then, she had made it her life’s mission to prove everyone was as corrupted as she felt. Not coincidentally, this was the same time she started wearing black eye liner, calling her cat “Shadow,” and holding these bimonthly meetings of disaffected suburbanites who fashioned themselves witches.

“And how do you plan on doing that Cin?” Stacy’s voice an eye-roll.

“I plan on summoning a daemon to tell us where you’d be if we weren’t here holding your hand.” Cindy’s attempt at gravitas failed. Rachel was rolling, Stacy was seething.

“Do whatever you want Cin. I don’t know even why I hang out with you, you’re so full of crap I’d be surprised if you still float! Explains why Troy won’t give you the time of day.” That and Troy was quite happily “seeing” Rachel behind Cindy’s back. I have to give her credit, she didn’t flinch.

“Fine then,” Cindy snapped, “get the candles!” She wielded an authority that neither of the other girls could resist. They scrambled to their feet, finding five votive candles they had liberated from the Mall the weekend before, placing them in a circle nearby.

With the mien of a stage magician, Cindy pushed herself to her feet and arranged the candles in a partially symmetric pattern, picking up a piece of chalk stolen from the school and using it to draw a circle of complex looking runes. Next, she walked to her laptop, its background overgrown with black roses, and pecked away at the keys. In five minutes she had a small stack of papers and was shuffling towards the other girls, handing each a copy.

“Tonight, we’re summoning Q’ural, daemon of the Seven Handed Clock. He speaks of futures that have failed to be and futures that still may come…” Cindy began.

Why is it that every clutch of humans who try this always manage to make up some new and more embarrassing name for us? I’d rather be called Bob or Ryan than some unpronounceable mess of accents and apostrophes.

“…unless,” a pointed pause, “unless you’re scared.” Cindy concluded.

Rachel was, all she wanted was to look cool in front of the other girls and have an excuse to wear black cloths, she hadn’t expected to have to do anything. Stacy looked angry, angrier than when they were children, and she found out that Cindy lied about her bike being stolen because she had borrowed and wrecked it.

“Just get on with it Cin!”

Cindy blew Stacy a kiss and finished moving her votives, lighting them in an unnecessarily meaningful order. Afterward, she took a seat in the circle and motioned for the girls to form a triangle with her as its apex. A moment of silence, then Cindy read from the sheets of paper. A few sentences in, she sputtered, “We really need four people to do this right.” A trace of petulance creeping into her voice and working its way across her brow, “Where is Kerry anyway?”

“Visiting her dad.” Stacy smirked, “Does that mean you’re giving up Cin?” Cindy snarled in response.

The first and only rule of demon summoning is to follow directions. As ridiculous as her little Internet cookbook was, it was right about the fact that Circles of Protection should be made of melted wax and not school-house chalk. It might sound like a little thing, but the Devil, as they say, is in the details.

“Powers of the Sky and Sea. Powers of the Beasts and the Fields. Powers of the Stars and the Moon, hear me and call forth Q’ural, Lord of Fate!”

Showtime.

I have to give them credit, they didn’t all pass out at once. Rachel did but after saw her disappear into the circle, Stacy and Cindy managed to stay surprisingly poised.

What happened next?

Situations like this all follow a pretty classic pattern.

First, fear –

“Wh…who the Hell are you?” Stacy stammered.

“Are you Q’ural?” Cindy followed.

“Sure, why not? By the way, Protection Circles are made of wax, not chalk. It’s a rookie mistake.” They started crying.

Then, negotiation –

“What do you want? Our bodies? Our souls? Where did you send Rachel? Please! If you promise not to hurt us we’ll do anything you want!” Cindy was screaming more than talking at this point, then it happened, I couldn’t help myself, I started laughing.

Finally, we come to acceptance –

“Rachel isn’t coming back, is she?” Cindy whispered, her voice raw from screaming.

“Not likely.”

“You aren’t going to let us go, are you?” Stacy was keeping it together better than her friend, respectable.

“Probably not.”

“Could I have a final request?” Cindy was holding onto consciousness by a thread.

“Why the Hell not?” I paused, “Wait. Is this that stupid question about Stacy?”

“No…I mean yes. Yes. Sorry. Is that OK?” Cindy’s voice caught in her throat.

“She would have been fine, lived a long, happy life, eventually spawned a couple of really lovely kids.” They went pale, paler than their caked on makeup.

“Are you lying?” Stacy was losing it now.

“Does it even matter?” I wasn’t, “Now, if we’re all done here, I have places to be…”

“So..sorry Stac.” Cindy mewled, pushing herself from the floor.

“It’s OK Cin.” Stacy dipped her head a fraction, gripping her best friends hand as they sunk into the darkening circle.

Three for the price of one, this was turning out to be a good night.

Take the guy in the hoody sitting to my left. The first question you should be asking is, “Why the damn hoody?” It’s about 94 degrees on your average Louisiana afternoon and the air is the consistency of week old Gumbo. In what Universe does someone wake up in weather like this and decide to swaddle themselves in a half pound of fleece.

Hoody Guys are usually your long term travelers, the kind who pick up month long greyhound passes in someplace like Boise, and just decide to see how far they can get before the food money runs out. For them, the hoodie serves the same purpose as a camper’s tent, half protection, half a sign of where their space begins and yours ends.

God, I must be losing it, I just spent five minutes talking about some poor guys unfortunate taste in outerwear. Ugh, there has to be something a little more… Did I mention how incredibly bored I am?

I’ve been traveling on this bus for the better part of 4 hours. Baton Rouge to Mobile, it’s a trip I’ve made about ten thousand times before, and it never ceases to irritate me. My Uncle Andrew says that road trips build character, I just think they build callouses and a tolerance for smelly hobos with nowhere else to be and frightened yuppies who have decided to spend the afternoon slumming.

Uncle Andrew is a burnt out hippie who at first glance would remind you of Bob Dylan pre-religious conversion. Back in the day he was a roadie, following Phish and Styx and a bunch of other bands I’ve never heard of. From what I could gather, the experience basically amounted to about a decade of drugs, drinking and strange sex followed by a stern talking to from my dad, which lead to a quasi-religious conversion and the birth of my cousin. Hm, I guess he’s more like Dylan than I thought.

Either way, the point I was trying to make is that old Andrew thinks that just about everything is an experience, especially when it means putting his favorite niece on a bus and having her spend 8 hours hating the Universe in order to come visit.

The thing I could never quite get was why my dad was always so OK with this. He was an accountant, in every sense of the word, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him laugh at a joke, and his idea of excitement is picking up an extra pack of oreos during our monthly trips to Costco. Dad and his brother couldn’t be more different if they were perfect strangers, but in this one thing they agreed — me traveling to see Uncle Andrew was an experience I would grow from.

Did I mention how strange this stupid bus is? You would think a Greyhound would at least have air conditioning, but no, apparently a discount fare means you get to boil while nestled between an overweight gentlemen with a breathing problem and Mr. Hoodie.

You know another thing about the kind of weirdo that you meet on a bus? They can’t just be weird in one way, they have to have some freaky compound weirdness — like the fellow to my right who could not only do to drop about 150 pounds, but also sounds like he is getting ready to choke on his own tongue. Then there was Mr. Hoodie over here, I don’t know his story but based on the fact that he refuses to even acknowledge my existence, whatever he’s hiding must be a doosy.

You want to hear another funny thing about Uncle Andrew? I’ve visited him maybe a dozen times since I turned 16, and in all that time he has never once talked about growing up with my dad. He’ll talk about me and my life with daddy dearest. The missed football practices and the time he “forgot” me at school for six hours and Mrs. Granger had to drive me home in her old, beaten down Volvo. He’ll talk about that all day long, but just mention his life with dad and he’ll change the subject like I’d just asked him about the year he spent in the CIA or something.

Gawd, the hoodie guy is really starting to creep me out. How can someone just stare off like that? It’s like he’s not even there — kapote, checked out, gone fishing, with no intention of ever coming back. I’d love to know what’s going on in his head, I’m sure creepy would be a gross understatement.

At least Uncle Andrew had a nice, big house. Weird how an old burnout like him could afford a place like that. Nice garden, a few acres of premium land, and even an exercise pool. It was like a country club, except it wasn’t. I guess that explains why there were always so many other kids over there. They were all about my age, but they had problems, kind of like the hoodie guy. Is it normal for a 40 year old man to board a pile of F’d up teenagers? Probably not, Uncle Andrew, probably not.

Ugh, I’ve been talking too much. You probably aren’t even listening anymore, are you? What do you need again? My ticket? Yea, sure, let me just find it. “Sir?” What do you mean by that, are you blind? I am not a “sir.” Hm, sorry, that was rude. Maybe you aren’t blind, I’m probably a little hard to see, give me second to get this hood out of my eyes.

Four walls, no roof, a movie set kind of place, except no movie set I’d ever seen was made of three foot thick frosted glass and girdled with a Faraday cage. Not a one. And me seen some movie sets in me day.

They say it’s for your protection. For Your Protection. When you’re in the room everything is For Your Protection. Food that tastes like toothpaste is For Your Protection, air that smells like burnt coffee, For Your Protection. Needles like daggers three times a day, For Your Protection. If they protected me anymore, I’d be dead within the week.

Listen to me though, whinging on like some kind of berk. I’d get out of here eventually, I always did, they loved me too much keep me for long. Just until me memory started clearing up. Until me head stopped swishing around. Until…

The room wasn’t so much cold as it was uncomfortable, just chilly enough to make your bare skin crawl but not quite cool enough to keep the sweat from beading around your ankles where they put the chains. For Your Protection. It made for some kind of amusing display though. Amusing because when the dark men, in their dark suits, with eyes like badly soldered circuit boards came in they was always having to wear sweaters. It must get damn hot, those sweaters. Nice material though, I’d need to get me one when I get out.

Your memory gets a little shifty in the room. It’s the needles. They say it’s for your heart, but nothing has ever been wrong with me heart. Me head though, that’s a different story. Me heads been caving in on me since I could remember, and considering my memory that could be a long time. It’s how me ended up here the first time. Me head started caving in while I was talking to that guy on set, on what must of been a big action flick. Was with me partner. What was her name again? Sara? Beth? Had four letters. I remember that. Four letters like me four little toes.

Bang! Crack. Blood and noise. Sara or Beth or whoever hits the floor. It’s leaking out of her like strawberry jam. Big, messy puddles of the stuff. Unusual though, the blood. Real anachronistic like. Usually it’d be scorch marks and silence and the smell of ozone. But usually it wouldn’t be Beth. Never Beth, not like this. Not on the ground in a puddle of her own jam, not because of some stepped up berk from out in the Zones. Couldn’t happen. Fired on by some pop gun before the gear or the drugs or the training even registered the bullets. Before she could shut him down. Before I could take him out. Before anything but the small, pathetic yelp and the grinding silence. Never. We was better than that.

Sometimes the needles make me lie to myself. Make me memory swish back and forth in me head. Make me think me was other people. Make me forget. Forget the bullet and the blood. They say it’s for your heart, but I know better, it ain’t for your heart! Never been nothing wrong with me heart. The room is for your head. The cage is for your head. Everything here is for your head, for the memories, the gear, the drugs stitched into your head like patches on a quilt. Once it’s there it don’t come out, that’s what the dark men with their mechanical eyes tell you the first time, that’s why they have the room, why they is protecting you.

Everything for your head then, everything but the glass and the chains. Them is for your hands. Killers hands. Hands that pull triggers and squeeze throats. Hands missing their better half, like a Sword missing a Shield. Beth’s hands. Hands that failed her.

But it’s the needles and me caved in head that makes me lie. That makes me think I is an actor on some movie set. I ain’t no actor. I was on a set once, but that was a job. A job I pissed on. Pissed right on.

That job…

Snap your fingers and it was over, she was gone, all gun smoke and gore. Me partner and me Shield, and there I was, left like the punch line to some bad joke.

Post Traumatic Psychosis they call it. It’s all the training and the drugs and the gear they say. It links you together, a Sword and a Shield, matched for life, one to destroy, one to disable. Lose one and the other breaks, head caves right in. It’s right there in all the manuals.

Violence.

Delusions.

Mostly violence though. Violence like the twelve broken ribs that berk took before me killed him. Violence and a thin smile. Violence that come to late to save the one thing it was meant to protect.

Doors opening. It’s the dark men in their dark suits and nice sweaters. A silver tray with its silver needle clutched in their arms like a talisman. They approach. Then pain. A sharp jab that I don’t fight, the jab that brings sleep, brings peace. A peace that comes over me like a wave –washing away the blood, the pain, the failure — the tip of the sword and the glint of the shield. Washing it all away, for now. Tomorrow I’ll do it all again, here in the room. For now though — darkness.

I find myself in Anytown, USA, in the kind of Pleasant Sort of Place one finds when one stops looking for Pleasant Sorts of Places. It’s a coffee shop, a cafe and a book store all wrapped into one. Mostly though, it gives off the overly polished charm of almost everything constructed after the turn of the last century, as if it was built as much as a playhouse as a place of commerce — where people with too much money and too much time could pretend to be busy in public — complete with a faux wine bar and a bored looking fire extinguisher, keeping it’s lonely vigil in the corner.

I’m seated at a table with a couple of chairs, a book, a large chocolate chip cookie and four too many ounces of medium quality green tea to keep me company, and all I can think about is, “Who designed this place?”

It’s as if some architecture student had gotten funding to construct a performance art piece devoted to the aspiring yuppie, and failed only in not including a sign showing the exact path the coffee beans took to make it to his cup.

Oh well, you go where work takes you and today it takes me here. So I wait. Wait for the moment when it will be time to leave this place to history and shuffle on to my next job. To fill the seconds I page through a nondescript piece of romantic fiction I don’t care much for and idly hope that this little rest stop remains as unobjectionably milquetoast as I imagine it has been since it opened its doors.

Sources say, unlikely.

A couple of middle aged men take a seat to my right, which is funny when one considers that of all the dozens of well appointed, garishly over-designed seats in this little slice of heaven they decided to pick the slightly too tall, slightly under-cushioned numbers next to the unfriendly looking guy reading the bawdy novel. Funnier still because by the look they give me, it’s almost as if they think they’ve done me a great favor. I guess they figured I hadn’t gotten my daily dose of dumpy, male human for the afternoon.

Ugh. Travel always makes me cranky.

The two gentlemen quickly become four, and their whispers a low but resonate roar as they fly into a conversation about the relative merit of whatever geo-political figurehead they happen to be siding with this cycle. Two of them agree that the one guy was clearly right about the thing, the other two think he’s a twat. All I can think about is how much nicer it was before Cable television made everyone a pundit. Book closed, headphones in. Something classical and LOUD…

“Excuse me sir, are you using these?”

I snap back to full consciousness. A man with an accent I can’t quite place stares down at me expectantly. He’s wearing the uniform of the office drone, muted shirt, muted pants and a tie just wacky enough to prove that he is a “go getter!” I raise a dark brow.

“Me? I was actually waiting on a couple of people…” I lie, he looks crestfallen, “… but I don’t think they’re going to make it in time.” I beam, he beams back, reaching for the chairs almost before I have time to finish. He grabs two, dragging them to the table on the other side of me. Moments later, my relatively quiet corner is filled with sound as no less than six of his significantly more dour, similarly garbed friends take up residence in my orbit, chattering in a language I wish I knew just so I could explain to them the finer points of coffee house etiquette.

But I guess this isn’t really a coffee house, is it? What is the appropriate etiquette for a yuppie shrine? I’m sure Amazon has a book for that.

As I finish my cookie, I begin typing away on a tablet I didn’t realize I had, grumbling something about peace and quiet. I’m interrupted by the sickening realization that the Internet is failing to Internet. This is a problem because, as I’m sure you know, cute pictures of kittens can’t just look at themselves. My mind spins and twirls over thoughts of reset routers and bad connections, as my eyes dance across my receipt. Then I see it, just below my bill ($6.47) and above the network password (excelsior), the tightly-spaced line that spells my doom, “Service: 30 minutes.”

I look at my watch and hiss. 30 minutes! Apparently, management had decided that 30 minutes was just enough time to finish a $12 Cafe Latte without burdening customers with frills like excess joy. Hhmp. I didn’t need the Internet anyway, it was just about time to leave and the kittens could wait for the next job. I rarely take joy in what I do, but today…

Both groups of people begin laughing in synchrony.

Today…

The last swallow of tea is as mediocre as the first. Finished, I neatly stack my meager belongings and give my watch one last check. The worst part about my job is the schedule, by the time I sit down, it’s time to pack up and leave again. The best part is that no one ever remembers I was there, so I don’t need to bother cleaning up after myself. As I begin towards the door, my eyes drift over the two groups still chattering away near my old seat.

For a moment, I consider asking one of them what they thought of me, “dropping in,” I decide against it, figuring the monkeys wouldn’t get it anyway. The fire extinguisher does though, and as I wink towards it, it decides to shuffle off for the afternoon to enjoy the little jab at the human’s expense, phasing out of existence so completely that weeks from now, when they’re cleaning up the charred husk of this place, investigators will still be wondering why a building of this size didn’t have one.

“That’s right … ‘monkeys’!” the rest of the joke comes back to me as I give the door a shove and step out into the warm, afternoon air. Honestly though, it’s a lot less funny than I remembered.