You’re at Grandma and Grandpa’s property in Frogtown for the summer and the California sun is too mean to let you play outside so you stare at Magic Eye books all day until you get good at unfocusing your gaze to uncover hidden realities. Your favorite illustration is the one of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Grandma catches you staring at that same page over and over and says you’re a naughty boy and takes the book away. But you aren’t looking at the 3D outline of Eve’s naked body or the serpent uncoiling from the branches but at the apple with the bite taken out of it. Just like the apple on your family’s computer back home.

Grandma and Grandpa have a Great Pyrenees named Charles who barks at the coyotes all night. There’s a hole in the fence and when nobody’s watching he likes to wiggle his big furry body through it and go find dead things. You’re eating lunch with Grandma and Grandpa when Charles walks into the house with big wet brown stains on his white shaggy fur.

The smell walks in after him. Bigger than Charles. Bigger than the house. Bigger than anything. The smell’s so strong you all stop eating. Charles must have found a dead deer by the side of the highway and rolled around in its mushy body.

Grandpa ties Charles up in the back and sprays him down with a hose for hours while Grandma opens all the windows and lights candles and prays but the dead deer smell won’t leave like it likes it here and really likes the cracks in the old wood frames around the Thomas Kinkade paintings. Grandma says it smells like some dirty thing’s reaching down inside her and pulling her guts out her mouth.

The smell becomes so big it’s hard to concentrate. Every human thing you attempt becomes a jumbled mess. But you’re good at unjumbling mess. Like with your Magic Eye books you focus on the stench by unfocusing on the stench and soon a hidden reality reveals itself. Below the big rotting smell is another smell that’s truer and sweet like marzipan.

Back home it’s hard for you to sleep without Charles barking all night. You lie half-awake and dreams linger just out of your periphery. You have no computer or TV in your room but you swear it’s illuminated by screen glow. At least once per night it’s hard to breathe and it feels like something’s pulling you deep into your mattress and you can’t escape.

At Julian’s tenth birthday party you’re first captain for basketball and you’re given the sacred duty of ranking your friends. Alan is brittle and he’s short like you. You would never pick yourself for a team so why would you pick Alan. Daryl is thick and sturdy and sweats a lot which means he’s hard to grab ahold of so he’s a good option. But Julian is tall. Limbs like the hungry vines in Jumanji. He’s always growing half a year faster than you. He’s a glimpse into the future. And can jump higher than everyone which is useful in basketball.

You are relieved of your duty when it begins to rain and you all go inside.

Julian takes all the kids up to his room and shows you his gerbils and tells you that the mama gerbil mates with the kid gerbils and sometimes eats the babies they made in their incest and also her eyes get glued up with really bad eye boogers. He plays big kid music on the stereo. Blink 182 sings about bestiality and pirates and you didn’t know they could make songs about that.

Julian is cool because he has his own computer in his room. He shows you Sims and how to kill your Sims. You can put them in a pool and they swim for fun and then you take away the ladder and they swim for their lives. Or you could make a fireplace and put a polar bear rug next to it and tell your Sim to go take a nice nap next to the warm fireplace and then you fence them in using your godlike powers to manifest fences outside the Sim’s perception of time and then the polar bear rug catches on fire. Sims aren’t like Charles and can’t find a hole in the fence to crawl through so they burn to death. A little pixelated Grim Reaper appears and sweeps up the pixelated ashes.

Your sleep troubles continue but you assume this is just how everyone sleeps. Like someone’s pinching the back of your eyes and you’re sandwiched between an invisible dream and the sponge-cake-soft mattress. Heart running fast with nowhere to go. Sometimes you smell something. Something sweet.

Every weekend is a sleepover with Julian, Daryl, and Alan. Sleepovers are all dim bedrooms and Mountain Dew and new realities bathed in the green glow of a desktop computer. Have you seen Tub Girl? You have to see Tub Girl. This is said many times until you finally see Tub Girl. She’s a big lady upside down in a bathtub and she’s shooting diarrhea in a perfect arc out of her butt into her face. You’ve never seen something like this and can understand why this is a must see. Your heart jumps and then you feel warm in your stomach. You think you should laugh and pretend to barf like your friends so you do but you don’t really feel sick. You think Tub Girl is happy about what’s happening to her. You can’t read her expression behind all the diarrhea but something tells you she’s smiling. She’s arranged herself purposefully in that tub like a cat fitting into the coziest nook. And she’s found a friend to take a photo of her in this private moment. A friend who understands.

Julian says there’s two other pictures you have to collect like legendary Pokémon. Tub Girl is Articuno and you need Moltres who’s called Goatse and Zapdos who’s Lemon Party. The other legendary images are fun but not like Tub Girl. Tub Girl is your first meme and your first violation and that means something and you hope she doesn’t feel violated by you staring at her from the other side of the computer screen.

Something joins you in your sleep prison. In the screen glow of the witching hours you see a silhouette flit in and out of your doorway. Its shape is elusive but you have to capture it. You feel its importance. You unfocus your gaze like your room is a Magic Eye illustration. You find the hidden reality.

The figure is tall and thin. Taller than Julian even. Something moves on its head. Two knobs growing out of its crown. They look kind of like Shrek’s ears at first and that comforts you. But the knobs grow longer and longer. They’re antlers. Growing just like you. Spindly and hard and sharp and pointing forward and backward in time. Wider and wider. Your inside grows with it. Pushing outward. Straining out of your ribs and chest. Straining to meet this thing you know but can’t name. Then the figure disappears.

Its scent remains. A waft of sweetness from the void it left behind. Marzipan.

There’s a shed in Julian’s backyard where his dad does office things. It’s cluttered with books and knickknacks and there’s a bed for when Julian’s dad argues with his mom. Julian wants to show you his dad’s Playboys. You’d rather look at his book of unexplained mysteries and learn about monks whose souls can escape their bodies and fly. You and Julian start to wrestle. You knock over books. You pull hair. No words provoke this and none fuel it. You fight. You lose. His limbs are too long. Always keeping you at a distance. You pinch his arms because it’s all you can do. He pinches back. You pinch each other’s thighs until they’re mottled with bruises. After you’ve tired yourselves out you’re both sweaty and breathing hard and not looking at each other and don’t acknowledge the fight. Julian says let’s go play GameCube and you follow.

When he’s not looking you look down at your shorts. For a second you think maybe you’ll have an erection and find out you’re gay. But you don’t have an erection so this means you’re not gay. If you were gay people wouldn’t like you as much but you would understand when and why you get erections. Right now it’s a mystery. It doesn’t happen when your history teacher with the low-cut blouse and the big bosoms leans down in front of you revealing a lot of her big bosoms. It does happen when you’re driving to Half Moon Bay and you’re crossing the tule marshes before the Ikea and the road’s all bumpy and you get hard and pile your hoody on your lap in case your dad can see it in the rearview mirror. Or it happens when you wake up from a nap and had a dream in cartoon style about Ash’s nemesis Gary taking a bath with Agatha the old lady with all the ghost Pokémon.

Or on Christmas Eve when you’re lying in bed waiting for Christmas in the dark and you realize you have a button on your boxers which is a new development because you used to have tighty whities but now that you’ve graduated from elementary school you’ve graduated to boxers. So you unbutton your boxer front pocket to make room for your growing private part which is growing for some reason you can’t comprehend. Then you realize you’re wearing your new cozy pajamas with Santa Claus print that you unwrapped an hour ago because you get to open one present on Christmas Eve before bed. These pajama pants also have a hole in the front for urinating purposes. You unbutton that button too and suddenly your growing private part is exposed to the warm air beneath your blanket. It tickles in a really nice way. You have a soft squishy pillow made of a cooling material. You wonder if that soft cushy cooling pillow would feel good against your private part that’s starting to hurt because it keeps getting harder. Your assumption is correct and it feels wonderful to rub that cushy cooling pillow against your private part poking out of your Santa pajamas.

Your bedroom door is open and the light from the living room is a dagger pointing at you but you’re safe from its accusation under your covers. You do your pillow thing very quietly always listening for encroaching family members because even though you don’t really know what you’re doing you know they have no part in it. Then the thing happens. You’re split down the middle along the line of your private part. Your crotch feels like that scene in that boring movie 2001 where that astronaut went through a wormhole and it was all technicolor and scary in an exhilarating way and you’d never seen anything like it and you wish the whole movie was like that scene but it was mostly just boring floating around in a symmetrical space ship talking to a blinking light. The nerves of your crotch are like that wormhole and you hope you’ll fall through it forever.

And then it’s over. In a panic you check the tip of your private part to see if anything came out. There’s nothing and you’re relieved because even though you don’t have a word for the wormhole-crotch experience you know sex is supposed to feel otherworldly like that but at the end of sex something comes out your private part. But that didn’t happen so you’re still a virgin so that’s good. But even though you know you’re still a virgin you feel shame. A shame as new and undeniable as the wormhole but black and white instead of technicolor.

The stranger in the doorway no longer flits in and out of existence but stands there firmly each night after midnight. One night he takes a step closer. His antlers scrape the door frame and the sound lives in your ears for weeks after though no scratches remain in the morning light. You don’t think he means you harm. His hand is outstretched to his side and pointed back towards the open door. Maybe he wants to take you somewhere but is too afraid to ask.

Alan has the best birthday parties. He gets all the coolest Zoids and new game systems from his dad who lives in Modesto. Daryl wants to play Call of Duty because he’s really good and knows all the guns from his dad’s war stories. You all take turns playing on the computer and with the power of the internet you talk to strangers while you kill them. The strangers are older. Maybe even out of high school. They could even be fifty years old who knows. When they realize you’re only twelve one of them asks do you want to hear a joke? Yes you do. What’s better than having sex with a twenty-six-year-old? You don’t know. Having sex with twenty six-year-olds. We don’t laugh but they do.

Could you be playing a video game with pedophiles? Or was it just a joke? You turn off the game and Alan shows everyone his new MySpace. Julian also has a MySpace and last night he hacked Alan’s account and posted a meme on Alan’s page. It’s a drawing of a deer with one horn pointing forward and one pointing backward. He’s wearing a suit and pointing at you. A caption under the accusatory deer says I’M GONNA RAPE YOU! Everyone laughs at this fun joke Julian played on Alan. You know rape is bad but you laugh because everyone else does even though you didn’t laugh when the stranger made the rape joke earlier. This time it’s different because it’s from a friend.

You don’t know this yet but that deer is named Mr_Mr_Centicore. He’s a meme. He has power. Your group moves from the computer room to the backyard. Because you still have destruction on the mind you play frisbee war. Daryl puts Alan in a headlock. Alan thrashes around like a bag caught in a thorn bush. His eyes dart looking for escape the same way yours did the first time you were paralyzed in your bed. You throw a frisbee at him and nail him in the face. He runs inside. His mom tries to comfort him. He cries and she takes him into his bedroom and closes the door.

You can still hear him crying. His mom asks him don’t you want to go back out and play with your friends? No I hate my friends! We can end the party early. No I don’t want that. Why not? Then I have to go to dad’s. You don’t want to go to dad’s? No I hate dad!

While all this is happening Alan’s stepdad tries to distract the rest of the kids in the living room. He says he’ll give a dime to whoever can wiggle their ears. Julian’s a natural. He’ll give a quarter to anyone who can stand on their toes like a ballerina. Daryl refuses because ballerinas are girls. He’ll teach you how to wrestle. Daryl accepts because wrestlers are boys. You refuse because Daryl is sweaty. Alan’s stepdad says he’ll pay you fifty cents so you accept. The stepdad gets on his hands and knees and he shows you the proper position for starting a wrestling match because real wrestling has rules and stuff. It’s in this moment while this strange man is telling you to get on your knees that you remember there are no other adults in sight and you kids could be raped. Those pedophiles on the computer claimed they could take on twenty six-year-olds. There’re only four kids here against one big stepdad with hairy wrists and a pocket full of change who’s an expert at wrestling. You don’t say anything. Just go along with it because nobody else is saying anything.

He doesn’t rape you. He just watches you wrestle and then gives you two quarters each.

You realize why the figure in your doorway feels familiar. He looks like Mr_Mr_Centicore. Just as the meme existed before you discovered it this figure had a name before you knew it. But the Mr_Mr_Centicore of creepypasta forums is evil and snatches children and makes them kill their friends and family. You don’t believe your nighttime friend is like that. Like Tub Girl he’s misunderstood.

Your grandparents die in quick succession. At the funerals your parents tell you to kiss the corpses because it’s an open casket and that’s what you do in those situations. Grandma’s cheek is soft like sponge cake. Grandpa’s is a sun-dried pomelo. They don’t smell like anything but the perfume and cologne they left behind. You wish they smelled like what Charles brought in from the highway. If not the marzipan then at least the rotting. But neither are here. The coroner sucked the death out of them with vacuum tubes. You inherit their Magic Eye books. You can’t open them because the pages are all stuck together with mildew stains.

YouTube is a new frontier bringing with it new magic. Melancholy is one such magic. On AIM somebody sends you a link to a video and they say it’s funny. It’s a low budget computer animated short about a kiwi bird who wants to fly even though his body was not made to fly. He nails a forest to the side of a cliff then jumps off the cliff. As he falls headlong the camera shifts and it looks like he’s flying not falling through the forest he’s constructed. A tear runs out his eye as he flaps his useless wings.

While doing research on horse mating for your AP Biology homework you stumble upon an interesting Wikipedia article about something called a mare. In Germanic folklore a mare is a little goblin that sits on your chest when you sleep. That’s where the word nightmare comes from. These creatures show up all around the world with different names: kanashibari, incubus, succubus, khmaoch sângkât, jinn, ogun oru, dab tsog, pisadeira. In the cracks of the internet people talk about the Night Hag and the Hat Man. An interdimensional species called Shadow People. Scientists name it sleep paralysis but don’t know much more about it than anybody else. Some consider these creatures horrific but you don’t feel that way about your nighttime companion. But it’s nice that others experience the same thing as you. Maybe sleep paralysis demons are like dreamy memes passed around from culture to culture renamed and reshaped. A connective tissue between disparate peoples who will never meet each other face-to-face but can experience the same truth across distance and time. Maybe the internet is just dreamspace made manifest with 1s and 0s.

Your antlered friend doesn’t follow you to college. The door to your dorm room closes automatically. Maybe he feels like you don’t want him there. At night you unfocus your eyes to try and conjure him from the shadows. All you see is an impression of a dream. A pencil sketch smudged by a cheap eraser.

You don’t make any new friends. Merely miss old ones. Alan is the only person you know at college. You room with him because he’s familiar even though he stopped inviting you to his birthdays years ago. You don’t talk much. You don’t apologize for throwing a frisbee at his face. You both tiptoe in the room but you don’t know why. The only sound in your room is the buzz of Netflix trickling out of your headphones and the muffled rustling of sheets at night when you’re both pretending not to masturbate. One day you return to your room and find him sitting at his desk wearing a dinosaur costume. He quickly puts his computer to sleep and disappears into the bathroom. There’s a sweaty handprint on his mouse. His screensaver is Mr_Mr_Centicore. It’s the exact same meme you saw six years ago but with a different caption. This time Mr_Mr_Centicore points at you saying I’M GONNA REBOOT YOU!

You feel jealous.

You barely speak to Alan until move-out day. Your dad helps you carry boxes down to the car. While your dad’s in the bathroom you’re alone with Alan. Without preamble he says your dad is nice you should be nice to him and describes how his dad is abusive and beats him every time he sees him and he has to live with him this summer because his mom is on a river cruise with his second stepdad. You don’t know what to say. You say that sucks and keep in touch and call whenever day or night. Before you can say anything else your dad returns and Alan shuts his mouth and leaves.

On the drive home from college your parents stop in Solvang which is a town in the California coastal hills that likes to pretend it’s a Danish village. You like this town. It’s a meme. It’s so fake that it comes back around to being real. At lunch your heart leaps because you smell Mr_Mr_Centicore but you’re only smelling the princess cake your mom ordered to commemorate your first year of college. It’s a strange cake that’s difficult to eat. Soft sponge wrapped in hard marzipan.

You don’t talk to Alan the next three years of college. Just passing glimpses in the dining commons.

A year after graduation Alan calls you. He tells you how he tried to kill himself senior year. He hanged himself in his apartment but his neck didn’t break. His roommates found him. They took him to the hospital. He got rehabilitated. He says he won’t try it again but sometimes he does miss how the rope felt around his neck. Tight. Cozy. Containing him when his skin wouldn’t do the trick. You don’t know what to say to that. You say that sucks and call anytime he feels like killing himself again day or night.

The call ends and you go for a long walk. You lie under an almond tree in Elk Grove Park. You stare at the canopy unfocusing your eyes. The leaves look like pixels.

Back in your childhood bedroom you can’t help but feel lonely without your antlered friend. You’re still pinned to the bed but the doorway remains empty.

With everyone home after college you hang out with high school friends. Daryl’s out of the military and already engaged to a stranger who sent him letters while he was in Afghanistan. They met in person last week and she gave him a handy in Corey’s hot tub. Daryl proposed to her the next day.

The others talk about the engagement because that is a big thing but you can’t help but stare at Daryl’s uncanny face. Sometime in the four years since high school someone cut away the sponge cake from Daryl’s body and only left behind the hard marzipan shell.

The others tease Julian about the time he butt-dialed his parents while Lori Fishman-Weist took his virginity. You don’t have a sex story to contribute. You haven’t kissed anyone yet except for a butterfly kiss when you were twelve but most people don’t count that. Julian shows you a video on his iPhone. Shrek is Love Shrek is Life. You’ve seen homosexual intercourse in media before but not like this. It’s only been rape before this. Usually in prison. But this video is the first time you’ve seen joy.

A young man prays to Shrek to visit him and Shrek comes in through his window. They make love and Shrek flies away. Julian waits over your shoulder for you to laugh at the right parts. You assume he finds it funny because of the narrator’s expressionless tone as he describes Shrek penetrating him. But you don’t find this funny because you understand that not everyone’s insides match their outsides. Just because you sound dead on the outside and your face doesn’t move when you say things doesn’t mean you aren’t filled with joy on the inside. You believe this young man is filled with joy when Shrek makes love to him. But you laugh anyway because Julian expects it.

One night you smell marzipan but the doorway’s still empty. Somehow this makes you lonelier. Somewhere your old friend is baking a princess cake. Is he baking it for you or did he find a new friend?

To distract yourself you start listening to podcasts at night. Spooky ones. Ghosts and UFOs. The earnest tones of these strangers are better than a lullaby and you believe all their stories.

As a temp at a bus company you transform chicken scratch numbers on paper logs into digital numbers on Excel sheets. Your coworker speaks to you all shift but only in catchphrases from Vine videos.

Put him in a coffin!

Put him in a coffin!

Put him in a coffin!

Ha got ’em!

Ha got ’em!

Ha got ’em!

Deez nuts!

Deez nuts!

Deez nuts!

On Reddit you discover r/realityshifting. That community believes in the multiverse and that you can astral project your consciousness into other realities in your sleep. Even your favorite fictional world is a tangible reality you can visit because imagination is just plugging an ethernet cord into the Universe. A lot of people reality shift to Hogwarts but you never really liked Harry Potter. Some have reality shifted into Shrek land. This is intriguing but you don’t want to live in a swamp. You want to reality shift into a crappy CGI version of your bedroom. You want the off-brand Shrek to fly in through your window.

Daryl is your first friend to get a divorce. You find out on Facebook when his relationship status changes. You want to reach out to him and say sorry but you haven’t talked in four years so you internet stalk him to find new things to talk about. He’s started a podcast called Eternal Mentality. The thumbnail photos show Daryl in a dark studio wearing a tight suit smoking a cigar while he speaks into a microphone. He shaves his head now and grooms his beard. He’s very buff and almost bursting out of the suit. The podcast episodes are titled things like BIBLICAL MANHOOD, PORN ADDICTION, AND INTIMACY or BOOSTING TESTOSTERONE NATURALLY: THE KEY TO HIGH ENERGY AND VITALITY. You decide not to message him because you don’t know what to say. Most of your old conversations were an exchange of memes and now his memes are different from yours.

You get sick and tired of smelling that baking cake every night so you reach up and grab ahold of the scent and pull yourself out of your body. You’ve astral projected for the first time but that isn’t important. You need to follow the scent. Find who he’s baking that cake for.

In your astral form you follow your astral nose out of the bedroom through the kitchen into the garage. There’s a new door there that never existed tucked between a box of your moldy Beanie Babies and your rusted tricycle. You open the door but Mr_Mr_Centicore isn’t waiting for you. A computer is. Your old family Macintosh long since trashed but somehow resurrected in this impossible room. The smell emanates out the cracks between the keys.

You reach out but an invisible hand yanks you back into your body.

You run into Julian at the grocery store and catch up. You know this conversation is only as long as the checkout line so you neglect the small talk and immediately ask if he remembers the time you wrestled and pinched each others’ thighs until they bruised. He looks confused. Or hurt. Or angry. You have always had trouble reading expressions and reading his is much harder now that it’s not the face of your childhood friend but a man impersonating him and there’s hair sprouting out of it and there’s lines by his eyes leading to more questions than answers.

After some silence Julian says he doesn’t remember it. You ask if he remembers the time when you all snuck into the elementary school during summer break and played truth or dare and Daryl dared you to butterfly kiss each other and you did and then it was weird and you took the next dare to run around the blacktop barefoot in 110 degree heat because you wanted to get away and you tore the skin off your soles but kept running and then you had to get picked up by your mom and she washed your feet in the tub and you couldn’t walk for a week. Julian didn’t remember that either. Julian has always grown half a year ahead of you. In six months maybe you’ll forget too.

Each night you get closer to the computer in the impossible room before you’re thrown back into your body. One night you even touch it. The keys are sticky and crunch when you press them. No matter what you try you can’t turn it on. But the scent is too much. You tear up the keys until your astral nails are cracked and bloody. Without keys there’s only a bottomless void. You believe you could fit through the hole if you dive head first so you grab an astral step ladder and climb to the top. Your dive is perfect and you fall through the keyboard into everything. Out of your house. Into the clouds. Into space. Out of the milky way through galaxies and a few million realities. You don’t remember all of them. They aren’t the reality you’re looking for. He’s not in them.

In one, you find yourself flying through a valley. It’s familiar. Reminds you of childhood road trips to Yosemite. But infinite. People hike the valley. Some whisper over campfires. Old friends catching up between lives. You fly past them. At some point the campers have erected huge white circus tents. They party like the parties you were too afraid to attend in college. Some watch giant HD videos of horses being born. Other organisms being born. Themselves being born. You remember this festival from a podcast you listened to trying to sleep. Some campers walk through the computer screens and are reborn on the other side of the glass. You consider rebirthing yourself but none of the options look appealing. Too fleshy and wet. Even the backstage of reality disappoints you.

You fly out of the valley into space again. You fly so fast. Planets and stars and dreams rush past you in a technicolor vortex. An astral tear slips out your eye and flutters behind you. You don’t know where you’re going but you’re guided by scent. Until.

Blackness. No stars. Nothing.

You float in nowhere for an eternity or two. Waiting.

Then he appears without ceremony. Not an antlered silhouette but your old friend all the same. He’s the color of princess cake. A green cursor blinking against the black. A start-up screen awaiting a prompt.

Hello you say.

As you speak green letters lightyears high manifest before you:

***YOU has joined the chat

You hear keys clicking. Booms that could spawn galaxies.

<MR_MR_CENTICORE> Hello!

Your astral heart beats quicker.

<YOU> I missed you

<MR_MR_CENTICORE> I never left

After all this time you still don’t know what to say.

<YOU> I’m bored. Can we hang out?

You wonder what’s taking so long for him to type.

<MR_MR_CENTICORE> I’m afraid that’s not what we do here

<YOU> Then what do we do here?

His green letters uncoil from the void like a serpent.

<MR_MR_CENTICORE> Reboot

You wait for more but his box only blinks. Waiting.

<YOU> I don’t want to

You’re hit with a terrible sound. AOL’s dial-up screech but in reverse. The sound of a revocation.

[FAILED] Try again

You wish you two could just hang out.

<YOU> So I have to reboot?

<MR_MR_CENTICORE> I’m afraid so

You try to imagine another you but every possible you is brittle and small.

<YOU> I don’t want to reboot as me

<MR_MR_CENTICORE> You don’t have to

You smell sweat. You hear the stretching of flesh on growing limbs. You feel phantom bruises.

<YOU> I don’t want to be anyone else either

<MR_MR_CENTICORE> I’m sure there’s something you’d like to be

You don’t believe him.

<YOU> Help me

[FAILED] Try again

Eternities pass and the green square blinks with cosmic patience. But you are frozen. Not frozen like your body back in bed. Frozen in indecision.

You don’t want to be anything fleshy and wet. Nothing like what you left pinned to your bed. That thing was fake but bad fake. Not so fake it came back around to being true. The outside didn’t show what was going on underneath. You want to be something better. Something everyone understands. Something everyone likes.

<YOU> I know what I want to be

You say this with conviction because you no longer have lips to muddle the words.

<MR_MR_CENTICORE> I’m pleased

You want to be a violation passed hand to hand with a smile. You want to be a depravity whittled down to a joke. You want to be a universal language. You want to be the scent of a dream slipping through cracks in the stars.

<YOU> I want to be a meme

The box blinks and you know Mr_Mr_Centicore is smiling even though he doesn’t look like it.

[REBOOT]

All goes black. The choral hymn of dialing up. An invitation.

You look at your astral hands and unfocus your gaze. You fracture into pixels. Rearranging. Remaking. Between your gaps you see a new reality.

You see us.

Faces alight.

Bathed in the green glow of you.

Editor: Austin Dewar

First Reader: Elinor Bonifant

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors