A Dance.

A dance.

The crash of behemoth legs, thick as tree trunks. Pillars to hold up flanks that could encompass all of the sea and sky and earth. Rising. Falling. Walking mountains claiming this Earth in deliberate, primordial strides led by yawning shadows.

A dance.

Furious horns and proud frills. Cracked shield-faces thrust up, out, and retracted, unyielding. Painted in striking bold pronouncements from one clan or another. Dizzying arrays of horns like an endless parade of the finest, fiercest blades. Sheathed in keratin to exaggerate, enlarge.

A dance.

Swaying, armored sides. Lashing tails clubbed and spiked, beaked mouths barking, snapping, coughing. Angry forms thrilled for a fight, eager to prove against predator malevolence. A thud shattering hungry teeth. A crack that splinters bone. A sickening slash at flesh that brings bloody rain.

A dance.

A thousand, thousand voices. Chorused, harmonized thunder. It sings out. It whispers. Valleys caressed, mountains mapped, islands charted; all by those who sing, those who speak. Entire histories dwell in those reverberating hymns, whole cataclysms preserved by undulating notes and howling requiems, chirped directions, screeched prayers.

A dance.

Great, crashing jaws crack the moon into pale macabre slivers like pitiful bone. Splintered, fragmented hopes dashed on fang numerous and terrible. They are swift and silent as death, archangels in the flesh and bear names as devastating as holy disaster. Shadows leaping, twisting. Leviathans sprawled. The dragons of old. Alive.

A dance.

Something ties them. Something conjures thoughts too abstract for the minds of mere primitives, something too vivid drives impossibly intelligent stares. In every guttural snarl are unspoken designs. Through slashing claws emerges a design. A unity.

A mind.

The Thing That Came in Summer

The world changed. Boundaries shivered. Something that had been *right* became *wrong*, just for a moment, just long enough for the slightest passage. No fanfare, no drama, no lights and catastrophe. Just the motion. Just the transition. Easy. Simple. Welcoming.

The world slid around the visitor like so much smooth water becomes glassy and transparent moving quickly across river stones. Sharp-edged shards appeared suddenly— some breakage would always occur— but then it was over. Unnoticed.

This place was like the last one. A warm, comfortable night. Moonlight thrown down from a crescent slash across verdant growth, murmuring water not far away. Voices, maybe, but hidden as small living things sang their final climactic choruses in the omnipresent dusk. The *hum-hiss-chirps* came everywhere. In a multitude of directions.

*Opportunities*. All of them.

The thing lay still. Unmoving from its arrival. An impossible chill radiated off of the strange, glossy shell in shimmering waves. Steaming faintly like so much unnatural foggy streamers. Anyone nearby would’ve noticed their breath despite June heat. But already, icy tendrils and summoned flakes were dissipating, leaving only wet traces here and there, exposing the thing.

It tasted the air. Unseen cracks and pores flexed. Inhaled. Exhaled. Scented growth, sensed heat, tasted motion. Unnatural senses unfurled in an eerie kaleidoscope. Somewhere at the core of thing came excitement. Eagerness.

Something dark and wet shivered. Shook, slightly.

There were voices now— close. Everything else had fled away into the incoming darkness, birds flittered and squirrels dodging, insects silenced and stilled. So the voices came. Close. The thing had no need to detect their joy, no desire to catch the flirtatious tones. Words meant nothing but signifiers of life, mind, and potential.

The bodies neared. They shone warm, bright as stars, vivid with pheromones and heat. The thing spied deeper, elated at glimmering brain waves and lightning neuron-linkages, all awash in so many dancing colors. Memories. Thoughts. Feelings. Innate, ancient drives that were beautiful, striking. But they paled compared to the thing, felt tiny and childish to it’s own singular drive, the final purpose that even now came in increasing waves.

*So close*.

But the thing had to wait. Kept itself tidy, tight. Moonlight and sunset vestiges glinting in cool, cold rivulets across its chitinous exterior.

The voices were close.

Closer.

Closer.

Just *there*, just at the edge. They mingled and tangled, brought so much rising into the air. The thing knew it could not fight it’s instincts any longer.

It shivered. Shook.

And grew.

You dig. You’ve been digging a long time. A featureless blue sky sprawls, staring down at you. It scorns you white-hot sunlight, painful and scorching. Judgmental as long vanished gods.

You’re dirty. Dust on clothes that in another world, another time, were expensive, implication of status. Now they’re just a shell. A hollow you live inside of.

Digging. Digging. Digging. A shadow crosses the sky on huge wings, plunges you into darkness for just a heartbeat. There’s blood under your fingernails. You swore you scrubbed and scrubbed, you were careless this time, so careless—

It’s done. Another doll in the dirt.

Dusk comes and chases the Sun over the horizon to usher in perpetual, desert midnight. Cold, unblinking stars manifest in silence. You numbly climb into your car beneath them. Driving away from this, from the thing you broke.

She’s there by the side of the road. Bloodied. Gazing at you.

Every mile is accompanied by that face.

No other cars. No gas station light, no haven town.

Just a cracked, porcelain face and bottomless, black eyes.

A U T U M N: R E Q U I E M

Heart of forest leaves down in the color of murder and fire, mind in fog and chilly downpours, bones made by clawing leafless timber that wants to gouge bleak skies. Autumn endless.

W I N T E R: T Y R A N N I C A L

Heart of marble, mind of icy lightning, bones of inky black water. Winter eternium.

*”Please keep all hands and in feet inside the ride at all times! Please do not—“*

Conrad and Lucy didn’t pay any attention. The Time Cadillac ride always started the same way. And they were too busy all over each other, submerged as deep in youthful needs as the Cadillac was submerged in deep time. Conrad was already kissing Lucy again, breathless and with too much saliva as the slick, black car slowly rolled over a desolate landscape that would’ve fit Hell or the airless Moon than Earth. Lucy ran her hands through her boyfriends short, combed brown hair, feeling the car lurch a little. Far away came lightning flashing beneath cataclysmic looking clouds all purple, bruised, and furious looking. She caught glimpses jagged landscape burbling, saw the eerie monoliths of volcanic happenstance which poured streamers of superheated gases into impossibly thin air. For a full threat minutes they rode over different variations: fire, ice, black blistering sands— even a sea bottom, flat and dark, with a single earthwide ocean far above.

*Boring.*

Conrad pressed a hand to Lucy’s thigh and she shivered just as they emerged onto land, felt humid air over her skin as kisses pattered themselves on an exposed throat like so much intimate rainfall. This place was disgusting: impenetrable swamps dominated by huge armored vegetable spires, encrusted with moss and lichen, and haunted by sprawling insects so massive that no matter what Father Martin would say it seemed downright ungodly that any Creator worthy of worship could’ve made them. Fingers brushed an innermost thigh, probing, just as their slow passage brought an automobile sized centipede to eye level. Arthropleura rose in undulating waves as cascades of armored legs cracked themselves against its plated sides, a dozen angry red chitinous sides. It was Conrad who yelped in fear, wide eyed and stupid, one hand thrown up against the monster of yesterday. Human hearts beating fast, beating hard.

Apocalypse thrown across supreme desert like a deathly blanket. Lucy just saw bones— miles and miles of bones, discarded skeletons that went on across eerie dark colored dunes. Sharp, ozone tinged air took an effort to breathe. God only knew what lived here. Was whatever had survived even lucky? Could it be considered *luck* to live here, in this silent world, a sun scorched wasteland dominated by the silenced dead? It chilled any motion between them. They huddled close. Quiet. Would this fate befall Man, would the fatal blessing of the atom undo everything.. usher us back into a final, silent world?

Giants sprouted up from ruin. Fast, fleet-footed things that in ample opportunity became behemoths, titans. An age of Olympian reptiles with no bounds. They grew, fought, lived, died. Mountains that walked, shield-faces that battered and slammed, clubbed tails that concussed. Lucy watched the very first flowers bloom: elegant purple splashed over white petals.

Conrad reached.

Something buckled, something bent. No trespassing. A cosmic reprimand that even here in this imaginary space would not and could not be allowed. It all happened in a moment. The Time Cadillac protested just barely, hissing faintly. Then nothing.

They stared. Mesozoic countryside stretched out into warm, evening sunshine. Skyscrapers redwoods loomed above ginkgos, cycads, ferns in majestic immensity, and threw thick shadows on grassless ground. Conrad felt his mouth go dry. Ancient mammalian fear rose from primordial memory.

Something roared in the gloom.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Jeeze. I’m inspired by everything. Music, certain feelings and atmospheres. Things will simply snap into place in my thoughts and I’ll see very vividly what they’re producing.