My attacker, my only real enemy, is invisible, implacable,
with disdain so profound it is outside human comprehension.

Only internally can I acknowledge our battle, externally I
remain who I was, who I want to be, who I have been shaped into by years and folk
and experience and whatever wisdom I can claim.

No longer can I plan and dream and wish and hope; all these
finally revealed as the shreds of zephyr they have always been.

Great wars are fought on my behalf by smarter, more
dedicated, more effectively armed warriors and amazons and I am carried along
in their train, as willing and as useful as an unmounted spare wheel.

Once I cavorted and frolicked, expending energy as though it
was an infinite resource, never contemplating how dear that energy would be now,
in this bed not mine, these nights alone, these days populated by strangers.

Like all creatures the equanimity I imagined and promised
myself when I reached this junction ghosts away in unquenchable heat for just
ONE MORE MINUTE!

I rage and shred and thrash, working as much as I am able,
panting and screaming, both in limb and soul but far more effectively in my
head than my traitorous body can manage.

At the end, though, peace descends, feather-quiet and as soft
as my heartbeat and I loose my muscles, calm the typhoon in my mind.

Death is always the victor, no matter how valiantly, how
nobly, how determinedly we bite and claw and rend and tear at that fiend, our
only real enemy.

Of course he hadn’t spoken to her other than that one time. 

Nevertheless he felt something for her.

“Good vibes” his goofy stoner brother would have called it.

On any occasion he could, he would sneak glances at her, thinking that she did not notice.

Little did he know that she was well aware of him. 

“I will kill him” she thought, while spying on him from her cubicle.

A few days later he gathered the courage to ask her out for a drink.

Dying was not his first choice for a thing to do on a date, but he would have to settle for just that.

No more – now the chase was all that was said and spoken of amongst the wayward and vainglorious, as Kelvin-Straussberg turbines cooled to zero-point ignition, and landing parties cast wide their customized scout plagues.  Graceful and clumsy they came, searching for what had become a kind of collective un-religion, an as yet unexploited collective of the civilized unraveling themselves – to chase, to prey, to stalk, to pursue, to catch, to hunt, to hunt, to the hunt.  Only it wasn’t like the cloying psycho-scents of the whore citadels and the slightly unkind lighting of the orbital doping gates, where men and women were pulled by pulsating need and not enough regret, yet – those who came on the hunt were driven, and not always pleased to be there, but come they did, in disgruntled silences and makeshift laughters they came.

Look, the surviving huntsmen spoke from the screens, look at where you find yourselves once you catch the ur-beast, whatever he may be, as all the months of striving collapse together upon you as you find yourself clutching some unknown species, now extinct mere moments after being found, out in the calm beyond the wilds.  It was all that was written and heard now, this singular rite that was the birth of the monstrous monster pilgrimages, of the bond forged from the knowing that each hunter who returned, young or old, kind or cruel, could claim a whole species for themselves that was theirs alone

Ankurra Alexandrovna thought these things as she laid down to her last night in camp, and whispered the words to herself, “The unknown I claim, as it claims me.  When I am gone, let me be free.”  Down deep in her something danced as dusk fell, and her fingers felt alive and well.

“Oui!”

“Non; sorry.”

“Go then.”

“Oh! Like, wait. I mean–”

“Again?”

#Diary

Nice work!

Over fifteen cycles of the moon had passed since her people had mourned her passing. Late in the evening the sentinels sounded the alarm that someone, or something, had passed the boundary and was heading towards the village. Another was heard to signify the inner wall had been breached. Dangerously close to losing her life to the ring of archers that surrounded her, she let her weapons drop, but not her guard, as the thing she held most precious to her – her sister – was lying at her feet.

Not that he couldn’t do it, it was just never that much fun for for him.

Grinning to herself she thought back on all the times he had tried, picturing the wraith of trepidation that instantiated on his face in the preceding instants. Only once had she witnessed him enjoy such, buoyed by liquor and the close attention of his peers, high on the success of project, he had been oblivious to the task at hand.

 Lips opening slightly his breath wispy and nervous, his arm started in motion.

“I love you.” he said, as if to deflect the moment.

“And I love you.” she replied, watching his fork move vibrate imperceptibly as it inched towards his mouth.

Dining was always a sure thing, he was so picky, especially when she served liver.

Nunzio wadded up my application and tossed it in the wire basket under the counter.

“Go back to the shelter and log some more service if you really need the money that bad.”

Ordinarily, I probably would have done just that.  Log some more time on the line, doing the brainless, humiliating, busy-work “service” that somehow made me worthy of a few taxpayer coins in my pocket.

Instead, and against my better judgment, I reached into the big canvas pocket of my coat and pulled out what used to be an Altoids box, now cool and heavy and, well, curiously strong.  Any possibility of a straight life for this maker vanished as I pressed my fingertip to the smoked biometric reader on the bottom of the box, and raised its face, and the coiled antenna within, perpendicular to Nunzio’s meaty left hand.  

Digits flowed across the ether, pouring into his Audit and Compliance chip like water down a drain, sealing his fate and mine.