by m maldonado

They call to me.

They tell me I should come back to them. They say Didn’t It Feel Better With Us? and lick their crusty black lips with an even blacker hunger at the same time. I can see it in what passes for their eyes—two shards of gold-colored glass: they want me. They need me. They are so hungry. Always so, so hungry.

It is not just their story, you know. I wander these streets of slick coal color with my eyes dancing, chasing face after face full of desperate hunger. Each one of them is different in shape, color, texture, whatever, but they all have the same expression. All different and all the same, all at the same time, those are the faces of those without homes. Money is what drove them to come here; money will drive them back out, if they’re lucky enough.a

Me? I’ll never leave. Those that call to me say No. I can do nothing against No. It is an absolute word, for those that call out to me in hunger. My will is never strong enough—never strong. That is my existence. I will never be strong enough to leave. I must walk these streets until those that call out are no longer hungry, when they have eaten all they can and more. Then, with full fat bellies, they will say Yes, you can go now. That is when I can leave this lifeless life.

I feel I am doomed to be here for eternity.

I shy away from the shadows as I walk; those that call out found their prison in the shadows long ago. Night is their world, and they are unable to leave it. The light is their death, but the darkness will always be their undoing. A trap is a trap, and so the shadows have trapped those that call out.

That is why I do not walk in the shadows. Once inside they will not let you out. They will drag you to the very bottom of their world and let you drown in the oil of their midnight oceans. They will claw at your very soul and rip it and slash it and carve designs of pure evil into it with their fires.

And they will laugh, and call you Fool.

I am not one of them, not by any stretch. Oh, they have Used me countless times, but that was back when I didn’t know any better. I have killed for them. I have thieved for them. I have done things that would make the bile rise in your throat just by description alone. I have done things that defy morality and, in my hypnotic stupor, not known what they were, or that I was doing them at all. I was always Elsewhere—a place undefined in shape and unknown in location, a dumping ground for the proper minds of the ones they Use. Sometimes the Used are discarded, thrown to the side to later be judged by the One Above, whose judgement is wise and whose verdict is set in stone.

Sometimes the Used are kept, and Used again and again until the End of Time…

I wish I’d been discarded. At least I would’ve known the peace of the Light Above, that eternal resting place. These days I’m not sure who or what I am, or where or why or when oh why oh why? I only know what is not, and that is not what I want to know.

I know I am not happy. I know I am not free. I know that I do not know enough, and that is my greatest weakness. Knowledge is power. I have very little power against those that call out. They do their best to keep those they Use as ignorant as possible; I have felt their oppression of my mind for countless ages and been unable to do anything about it. I just do not know enough to fight.

It has begun to rain. I pretend I feel the water splash on my head, in my hair, on my back, while something in the back of my mind knows it really isn’t. I have no substance in this world of light and shadows, and without substance there can be no contact. My imagination is my only tie to the senses I’d taken so lightly in life. One’s imagining falls utterly short of true sensation, however, and the pretending always ends in true disappointment.

My pessimism has cut through my false sensations, and now the world is once again beyond my touch. Frustrated as usual, I march down these empty streets—empty to the apathetic, full of faces to the compassionate—striding through growing ponds without making the slightest ripple, intercepting car fenders without injury, and brushing against people without contacting them. I live a life of paradoxical death, where I think and yet do not breathe the air. I exist in a world where I do not exist to those who do not think of me. I think, therefore I exist, but I am not thought of, so to others I am nonexistent.

Something so cold it burns rubs against my arm. I jump away from the source, a shadow I had wandered too close to while thinking idle thoughts. I watch as the shadow shifts, two yellow triangles flashing in the hated light. I watch the shadow smile, its mouth a half-circle full of gray teeth the length of my hand. It chuckles, a sound like the rapid cracking of bones, and I see it beckon to me with a tendril of darkness.

I walk away with the unsettling knowledge that I will not be resting tonight. Those that call out have need of me, and they always get what they want. I have no way of escaping in this city of shadows and alleys, where every turn leads me down the road to torment. They have infiltrated every edge of this sad, sad world.

The giddy cracking of bones is closer now. I must flee these streets.

Safety remains hidden from me. The laughter of those that call out, those that feast on the unbreathing, is all around. The laughter speaks to me, taunting and teasing and telling me that, of all the Used, of all the countless millions they could feast upon, only I will suffice. It’s me or nothing.

And yet I still run. It is not in my nature to give in when there is still a chance. A slim chance, definitely, but a chance is a chance, and should not be freely discarded.

And so I run, jumping and leaping over paths of shadow into trails of shaky gray light. I can feel their claws, sharp and curved and black, scrape against my leg as they grope playfully for me. They play with me because, after all, they will always get what they want. That is the nature of their existence, and to deny one’s nature is to deny one’s existence.

Am I denying my existence by running from them? I think not. My existence was etched into me long before I was first Used, and such an etching cannot be removed. It can be hidden, but it cannot be removed.

And so I run, and I hope, and I look for some way out of what has become of me. Hope is the only weapon of the Used, and a scarcely-utilized one at that; those that resist are repressed, and the repressed are Used, and the Used are recycled or replaced. So simple, the ways of those that call to me, screaming threats and enticements now, beckoning to both the side of me that fights and the side that tells me It won’t be bad, it won’t hurt but a little, like all the treacherous nurses say when they prick you with their sterilized steel stingers.

But we all know the truth, don’t we? The needle—whether it is going to withdraw or deposit, leave or receive, it doesn’t matter—will hurt, going in and coming out, and the in-between. You are drained or filled, but either way you are being invaded by something unnatural.

They are unnatural. They were not intended. This is known, but little is done to make use of the knowledge, and so it becomes everyday. What is knowing without doing? One must go with the other to see results; the isolation of either one ends in failure.

A drunk staggers across the street in front of me, the bottle in his weaving hand spilling black-brown liquid in every direction. His clothes are stained with the drink, which is filled with them—I can see them from where I stand. They blink and grin at me, and call to me to Have a drink, it’ll set you at ease with that look in their eyes, a giddy bloodlust that tells me to run.

The drunk drinks, and I wince as part of him slides away from his body. He is losing the slow war, the war that takes out the targeted and the closest people around him. I hope to those above that this man had no family or friends and move on. The bottle cackles at me as I pass.

The road I turn onto is the same as the one I began in, lined on all sides by people, but in these people there is a distinct difference. Where the first were driven into poverty by money the second forced their way in, and have locked the door tight behind them.

A man shoots them into himself with a needle. He sighs as they numb his mind, much in the way a mosquito numbs an area when they drain blood, and lets those that call out suck at his thoughts. The man next to him takes the needle away and sluggishly kills himself.

I’m running now, with the dark ones all around, laughing and playing and dancing in the shadows, having a good time with their unsuspecting victims. They laugh at me, too, because I am trying to escape their attentions. They laugh to tell me It is all in vain, you cannot win!

Behind me someone coughs, hacks and dies. White powder, like powdered sugar but not, dear heaven not, spills from a pair of shaking hands. The fingers of this hand are twisted and white, thin on skin and slick with sweat. The sound of this rasping, shaking death chases me to the end of the street, where I suddenly find myself where I had hoped not to.

I have reached the end of my road. What little light available to me is gone now. From here on there is nothing but darkness. Behind me they have devoured the light, leaving me in

Here they will Use me.

I can hear them coming, now, the clicking of those little black claws and the gnashing of much larger black teeth. Yellow eyes are all around. I will not escape, not this time.

The light is shrinking. Not much longer now…

Instantly there is a scream of agonized metal and burning rubber, and a car comes spinning out of the dark, bouncing and spiraling off the ground and into the air as it closes in on me. I watch in awe as it rises up, higher than ever with this bounce, and—

—and comes right down on top of me.

The explosion comes and goes so fast I don’t even register it immediately. One moment there is darkness and yellow triangles, and in the other there is bright orange fire on all sides.

I have been spared. I am now on borrowed time.

Best to make good use of such a gift.

I look for them, and shiver—a reaction inherited from long ago—when I find them already looking at me. They are grinning now, but in the barest sliver of a moment I know I saw them frown, their teeth jutting up past their lips. It looked like the face of some weird warthog, grotesquely stretched and filled with blood.

Those sharp shards of gold peer at me. I wish to do nothing less than curse them, but I know cursing will only make it all worse in the end. Silence is my only option, as stillness is my only action. I cannot move from where I stand. The fire eating away at the car beside me keeps what haunts me at the walls, but it can only burn for so long. How much time do I really have? Hours? Minutes? Seconds?

Minutes, it seems. I can hear the waving wail of the police bearing down on me, and I know the firelight will not protect me much longer.

They always get what they want, in the end. Every time.

The ambulance arrives first, stopping with a sliding screech that rivals the sirens themselves. The back doors snap open, releasing two men from its confines. They rush, stretcher between them, to a spot on the other side of the fire. I know what they do without seeing them do it, and with that knowledge comes pity; pity for the poor soul who drove this car.

I can hear them, now, and the screams of a soul being Used for the first time. I pity, and I pity for myself and others, for it as all our fate to be used.

The firetruck is here. The flames—my light, my salvation—are disappearing under waves of water. The fire is dying, and They are closing in on me.

There is no light.

I am to be used.

They always get their way.

Always.