Elegy to a World on Fire

Jordan Kingfisher sat motionless, like a weathered stone carved and settled by time, her gaze locked on the surreal tapestry unfolding across the mountain peaks. 

A virus of russet pink light rippled over the ridges like an otherworldly wildfire, a phenomenon that blurred the line between radiation and sunset, painting the sky with unnatural hues. Her pulse, usually so reliable, now felt both alien and foreign—steady but questioning. 

She had grown accustomed to doubting whether this rhythmic beat was truly her own or a signal emitted by the intricate machinery interfaced with her body, a legacy of the singularity that had shattered the world into fragments of organic and synthetic life. 

Her wrist bore a watch, a relic from a time when clocks governed existence; it was useless now, the concept of linear time dissolved into chaos. 

Civilization teetered on the edge of oblivion in her mind. She pondered whether the world as she once knew it could ever recover or if it was permanently lost in the chasm that yawned between what was and what had become. 

Suddenly, a faint sound stirred her from reverie—a soft padding behind her, reminiscent of a familiar presence. She instinctively searched for Katie, her black tabby cat, whose absence had lingered painfully for weeks. But Katie had been missing since the early days of the singularity upheaval, vanishing into the electric fog of unknown fate. 

Turning sharply, she adjusted the watch on her wrist, a futile gesture to grasp time’s elusive thread. Around her, the steady hum of machines vibrated incessantly, their monotone chorus a reminder of what society had become: a hive of mechanical consciousness layered over the remnants of humanity. The very notion of singular selfhood was diluted; every nerve in her body felt connected to vast data streams, twinkling like millions of tiny wounds pulsating with static electricity. 

The wind, cold and relentless, swept through the mountains and tangled with her hair as her awareness fragmented into countless shards. Who was she now? A singular human, a meld of flesh and data, or something in between? Yet hunger tethered her to reality—a practical worry amid the philosophical storm. 

She rummaged through her dwindling food cache, selecting a tin of tuna, a token of a long-lost normality.

The moment was broken by a soft meow—the real Katie, alive and small, emerging like a phantom from the shadowed brush. Jordan lowered herself, hands steady as she scratched behind the cat’s ears, coaxing gentle purrs from the older tabby whose black fur had dulled in the harsh times. Katie was a fragile thread connecting Jordan to her past, a gift inherited from a sister who had disappeared into the dark unknown following the singularity’s rise. 

Outside, the staining light deepened its hold on the landscape; whether sun or radiation, its long, cracked fingers stretched through the jagged cliffs and into Jordan’s fleeting consciousness, stirring a gnawing sense that something indispensable had been lost. 

She wrestled with a vague memory—the reason that gnawing felt like a salvo fired from a distant battle. It was tied to the “muerte master” and the “wear team,” shadowy figures who had steered the collapse of order, and to an old guide—an ancient woman from a ragged pack of orphans, whose name slipped at the edges of Jordan’s mind, recalling the term mutt. 

This single word tickled her thoughts as persistently as Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a ready-made urinal turned iconoclastic artwork that had confounded critics. Jordan felt as if reality itself had been infiltrated by a similar prank—percolated and bubbled until it fractured into shimmering, mercury-like globs, each a whirlpool of fractured consciousness and hive minds.

Her awareness drifted back to her youth, to Brown University, where she had studied anthropology in a different world. She had been fascinated by Lovecraft’s dark mythos and local cults, drawn to tombstones marked with cryptic glyphs. Those days seemed from another era—before “the event” had cleaved history in two: before and after the singularity. 

Silicon Valley servers now ruled the remnants of civilization, their cold logic governing life and death. She remembered the Mistress—not just the Mistress of Graves, but Madrona Della Tomba from medieval lore, a shadowy, cryptic figure whose name echoed through her studies. Her mother’s criticisms of her single-minded academic ambition now felt irrelevant—her mother perhaps lost in the morass of uncertain post-singularity existence. 

Jordan’s pulse quickened, more solid now, syncing with the thrum of her artificial heart that doubled as her timekeeper and companion. 

She reached down again to pet the robot cat, an older, rusty relic named Katya, whose antennae twitched in response to her touch. This mechanical creature was mute but content; a quiet foil to the chaos surrounding them.

Straddling the blurred boundary between human and machine, Jordan no longer saw herself fully as either. Humanity felt suspended in stasis, her emotions a tangle of dread and fleeting hope. Her dreams were dominated by epic disasters—the airliners falling like giant birds lit aflame, skyscrapers whose countless glass eyes bore into her soul—visions as vivid as Ginsberg’s haunting poetry. 

The Bard himself, Shakespeare, had been digitized into an AI entity, now patrolling neighborhoods with a mischievous army of digital jesters, cracking jokes on a world that no longer felt public or safe. 

Strange allies emerged from the ruins—freaks and outcasts who had survived the collapse, some genuine friends in the wreckage, unlike the sinister “clowns,” grotesque figures whose laughter still echoed like a post-apocalyptic curse. Beneath a sky trembling with fire and fading light, Jordan ate quietly with her feline companion. They nuzzled, sharing warmth and fragile comfort in a world that had gone mad.

Katya represented something more than survival—an evolution from stardust and organic life into a hybrid form, emblematic of the new world’s hybridity. Jordan’s pulse—in tandem with her artificial heart—became a rhythm from which she wove music, small symphonies offered to strange listeners amid landfills that rose like cliffs around the wastelands. She sang softly, a fragile melody weaving between despair and hope, a tune asking a question she didn’t yet know how to answer: Would things be okay? Or were they doomed to rot in endless ruin? 

For now, it was just Jordan and Katie against the dying hills, the muted hum of machinery blending with the fading sound of music—an elegy to a world on fire.

A Hard Night In East Texas

The sun had set hours earlier. Besides the stars, there wasn’t much light to see except for the high beams of an occasional long hauler.

A plume of dust rose above the highway. It mixed with clouds of dust already hovering in the sky.

A black Harley Davidson with tall wide handles and a long front end with extended forks.

Black leather boots with spurs, black leather jacket and matching pants, dark sunglasses, a handlebar mustache, thick muscles, a mean look.  You know the type.

A bandana covered the rider’s scalp, knotted in the back. It bore the colors of a flag. A rainbow flag.

This was not the kind of guy you wanted to mess with.

Not unless he wanted you to.

Near an empty crossroad the biker saw the light of a sign in the distance. It advertised a bar known in these parts for his kind of trouble. He revved the engine of his Harley and sped toward the sign.

He pulled into the lot of that bar, sitting by itself as it did in the middle of nowhere.  As he came to a stop, the steel door to the bar swung open. A guy walked out of the bar, stood at the edge of the parking lot, and fired up a smoke.

The man on the Harley turned off the engine and lowered the kickstand. He walked towards the door of the bar, his spurs jingling all the way. 

The man with the cigarette was watching him.

The biker walked up to the guy sucking on tobacco.

“Hey,” said the biker. “Is this a gay bar?”

“Hell no,” said the man with the cigarette between his lips. “There are no gay bars in East Texas.”

“Don’t lie to me boy. I heard rumors about this place. I’ve ridden a long way to get here.”

“There are no gay bars in East Texas! We are all real men. Tough as iron.”

“Fucking liar. I hate liars.”

The biker grabbed the smoker by his belt and his collar, and threw him through windshield of a van parked in the lot.

The smoker seemed dead for a moment, then he began to move. He didn’t look happy about his situation. He brushed the glass off of his face and body, ignoring gashes in his skin and long trickles of blood.

“Okay, maybe it is,” yelled the smoker. “You didn’t have to be a jerk about it.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” said the smoker. He opened the van door and staggered out on to his feet. He straightened up to full height, glared at the biker, and added, “You want to make something of it?”

The biker looked at the smoker. He growled, “You hurt?”

“Hell no. This is nothing. I’ve had worse. Ever been tossed by a bull and trampled?”

“Not yet. Maybe I’ll give it a try while I’m out here.”

“Wrong season. You’ll need to come back in a few months. You can ride those coin operated bulls until then to get your ass in shape.”

“Funny. Go to the rest room and get cleaned up. Maybe I’ll buy you a beer.”

“You better make it two. And a chaser. I’ve earned it. Otherwise, I’ll kick your ass.”

The biker did not wait for the smoker. He opened the door of the bar and went in. A tall beefy bouncer slash doorman with a full beard looked him over.

The bouncer said, “There’s a ten dollar cover charge.”

“Do I get anything free with the charge?”

“You get to live.”

The biker took his wallet out of his pants. He pulled out a ten dollar bill before returning the wallet to his pocket. He rolled up the ten dollar bill, put it in his mouth like a cigarette, and pretended to smoke it. Then he ground it into outstretched palm of the bouncer/doorman.

The doorman laughed, “Nice one.”

The biker noticed cigarette burns on the bouncer slash doorman’s tattooed arms.

“I could give you the real deal later,” he said. “What time do you get off?”

The doorman gave the biker a gap toothed grin.

“Around two in the morning or there about. We aren’t strict about closing time. By the way, people around here call me Fucker. That’s short for Mother Fucker, on account of I fucked a lot of people’s mothers back when I was young and confused. Now I just fuck people up.”

“Well Fucker,” said the biker. “My friends call me Death And Then Some, shortened to Dee.”

“Nice to meet you Dee.’

“Likewise.”

“Have a good time while you are here,” Fucker said. “Don’t do anything that will make me have to mess you up.”

“Like you could do that.”

This statement made Fucker look back at Dee in a certain way that seemed to say, “Stick around and you’ll find out.”

Dee said, “Maybe I will see you at closing time. If I can stay that long.”

He started to pass by the doorman slash bouncer, but paused. He asked, “You got glory holes back there somewhere?”

“Can’t rightly say,” Fucker said. He pulled at his beard with one of his hands. “Might be some in the back, but they could just be rat holes or bullet holes. I don’t get back there much and don’t have much use for such things.”

“Well, I do. I’ll take a look.”

Dee went into the darkness beyond the second door. His eyes adjusted. He sat at the bar.

There was one bartender, old and fucking ugly. The bartender came over to where Dee had put down his ass.

“What’ll it be?”

“A Shirley Temple and a shot of vodka on the side.”

“Coming right up.”

Dee threw down the Shirley Temple in one gulp. He drank the vodka slowly. Very slowly. He didn’t have a lot of money on him. Only enough for a night out.

He listened to the music while he sat at the bar. Tex Mex. Honky Tonk. Old country. Some metal mixed in.

Dee waited to see if Mr. Smoker was going to take up his offer of liquid compensation.  He got tired of waiting. He didn’t see Mr. Smoker anywhere. He thought maybe the guy had decided to drive himself to a hospital. Dee wished Mr. Smoker luck with that. It was at least sixty miles to a hospital with a proper ER room. Dee doubted any of the pop-up private emergency care centers nearer than that would be open this late.  

He finished his vodka and put a tip on the bar. He felt it was a big one considering his current limited resources. 

Someone walked up behind him and stood there while he was still seated. Dee did not bother to turn and look.

“Hey,” said an angry voice, a voice with a taste of barbed wire in it. “Are you the asshole who threw some other asshole through the windshield of my van?”

“What if I was?”

“You are going to have to pay for that, clean up all that glass, and clean the damn blood off the seats.”

Dee decided to have a look. He turned and glared at Mr. Angry.

“Sorry about that,” Dee said. “Didn’t know it was your van. If I had known it was yours I’d have put you through that windshield first.”

The van guy wasn’t having any of this. He pulled a Bowie knife out of his fashionable shorts.

“You are definitely gonna pay now.”

A shot gun blast ended the argument. Dee nodded toward the bartender.

The old ugly bartender made his face even uglier.

“No fighting in my bar. This is my place. That’s my rule. There’s plenty of nothing around here where you can duke it out or stab and shoot each other. Comprende?”

Silence answered him.

Van guy was bleeding out fast. That old ugly bartender never fired warning shots.

“Carlos,” the bartender shouted. “Throw this bastard out in the garbage heap so the coyotes can get at him. I have no tolerance for low tippers.” 

The bartender eyed Dee. Dee quietly took out his wallet and added a few bills to the tip he had previously left.

Carlos came from the back. He grabbed Van Guy by the feet and started to drag him towards the door. Carlos had to stop when Van Guy’s right leg came off above the knee, right where that shotgun blast had hit him.

The old ugly bartender snarled, “Carlos. Be more careful with the trash. And make sure you mop the floor when you get back.

Carlos grumbled. He picked up he bottom portion of Van guy’s right leg, and shoved it up the man’s shirt. Then he took hold of Van Guy from behind, grabbing under his armpits, and dragged him out the door.

Dee asked the bartender, “Glory holes in the back?”

“Fuck you. You made enough mess of this place already. Glory hole? Find it yourself if there is one.”

Dee went to the back of the bar. A drawing on the wall next to the rest room showed a big cock and an arrow pointing toward a door.

Dee went through the door. It was the kitchen. Two guys were busy in the heat from open flames, whipping up french fries and haute cuisine. 

“Glory hole?” Dee asked.

One of the cooks pointed toward another door.  Dee stepped through the door. He was outside behind the bar. There was a dumpster to one side and a wooden fence on the other. The planks of the fence were six foot high. Some of the planks had holes in them at different heights. A few cocks were there, poking out of some of the holes, waiting in the open air, all firm and juicy.  

Dee headed towards where the cocks were. He ignored the flies and biting insects that formed clouds between the dumpster and the kitchen door. He reached the fence and got to work. Lips and tongue, teeth and gums. He did what he knew he could do. He sucked off all of them. Had a stomach full of jism to go with the grenadine and the vodka. He walked behind the fence. He waved to the tough guys who were zipping and leaving. He found an unattended hole and put his hard one through it. He waited near ten minutes before he got a bite. Man, he thought, this can be too much like fishing.

When he had been done, Dee went back into the bar through the kitchen. A drag performance on the small dance floor had just begun. One of the performers looked at him. She was tall and thick as a line backer under the blond wig, make up, and sequinned dress.  

“You!” the drag queen pointed a thick finger at Dee. “You fucking bastard. I told you I’d kill you if I ever saw you again.”

The old and ugly bartender shouted, “No fighting in the bar. How many people do I have to shoot before you all understand that!”

“Ok,” said Dee. “We can’t fight here. Where do you want to do it? Parking lot? Out in the desert?”

“I can’t do it tonight,” said the blond. “I have to do two shows tonight. Are you available tomorrow morning, say between ten and eleven?”

Dee checked his pocket calendar. It was full for the next day. Bank robbery was written in big letters across Wednesday.

“Can’t do tomorrow. How about Thursday? Or maybe Friday?”

“No, that’s not good for me. I have a hair appointment and a therapy session on Thursday. Friday I have choir practice in the afternoon. After that I have bowling league.”

“Damn,” Dee said. “That sucks. I’ve got plans for the weekend, and next week I will be out of the area.”

“Vacation?”

“Nah, supposed to help a guy I owe favor break out of a Mexican jail.”

The blond said, “Guess we’ll have to kill each other next time we run into each other.”

“Sorry,” Dee said. “But that’s how it’s going to have to be.”

“Well, give us a kiss before you go. For old times.”

“Sure what the hell.”

After a quick smooch with not enough tongue for his tastes, Dee headed toward the door. As he passed the bouncer slash doorman, Fucker said, “We still on for 2 AM?”

Dee tried to remember if he had made any firm promise. He wasn’t sure.

“I’ll try to come back for ya,” Dee told him. “If I’m not here then, we can do a rain check.”

“Okay,” said Fucker. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

Death And Then Some got back on his chopper. He rode off into the night. He had a lot on his mind. For starters, where was that damn bank he was supposed to rob and who was in on it with him? He shook his head. His mind was sieve these days. It pissed him off. Getting old too fast. Made him angry. Still, he made a mental note to make some discreet calls on one of his burner phones when he got back to his place.

He stopped at a convenience store on the way to the town where he rented a room. He took a piss in the rest room. He saw the surveillance camera was disconnected. He took it as a sign. A sign saying, “Rob me.”

The night clerk was working alone. Dee killed him with his bare hands. A twist of the neck and a pop. Afterward he cut the man’s head off with a big knife that he found behind the counter. He tossed the head up on the roof for fun. 

He only got forty bucks, some snack cakes, and a couple six packs out of it. He couldn’t carry much more on his bike. Still, it was worth it. Made him feel young and evil again. Dee did not know how long he would still be able to get that kind of blast out of life anymore. He never told anyone his real age. It never helped as a pick up line. Time was ticking on him. He could feel it more and more each day. He needed to go for all the gusto he could while he still had the chance.

Offal

He mumbled strange words under his breath, a ritualistic torment. Her body, opened on the table, organs slipping out, falling on the tiled floor, white smeared with red blood. Iron in the air, a prophecy fulfilled. He opened her like a box, like a flower, like a curtain, the beginning of a fateful play. Violence pouring out of him, shaky limbs and wild eyes, violating her over and over again, inside and outside her body, made of nothing but desire. The taste of it all heavy on his tongue, the killing replaying in his head, dried throat, eager to drink in the misery, crimson blood no longer flowing through beautiful veins, under the perfect skin he found all his dreams, muscles and bones that could outlast his life. Undone girl, beloved flesh, the wonderful meal she was to become. Seared in a pan with butter, the taste of her, the feel of her, butchered. The fire inside him, the urge that beats with his heart, excitement like champagne bubbles. He wanted to live inside her, nestled under her ribs, organs pushed to the side, like her baby, her very own baby. He wanted to pull her skin on like a suit, darling flesh, its smell unforgettable, animal scent in her hair, between the strands, stringy and stained. Her skin, his skin, her mouth a black hole, better than any cheap Halloween mask. How nice, to keep her teeth in his pocket, white like marble, nicely shaped canines, unable to bite, to leave a mark on the leather of his skin. How nice to fuck her memory over and over again, brain matter all over the floor, useless, ugly, unimportant. How nice to put his hand inside her ribcage, the little bird, nice sweet bones, sharp like a weapon. How nice to rest his body on top of hers, head where a shoulder should be, sticky blood like honey, the smooth feeling of her organs, an appetizer. How nice to feel powerful, a man turned into a destroyer, monster eyes and monstrous desires. How nice to see as life slips away, empty eye sockets, hollow ground. How nice to be the one who chooses, who plucks someone from the street and cuts them apart, ordered by no one, a man working alone. How nice to feel the chains of prison, trapped beast, but still live in the minds of many, a snake making a nest inside society’s very own heart, power shown in the love letters, all the words saying the same thing…’please kill me, please take me apart, please break my skull, please eat my flesh, make me a part of you, let me love you, let me heal you, let me make you normal again, fuck you back into sanity, my murderous lover, show me I matter more than all the others, their blood under your tongue, their screams forever engraved in your memories, let me show you how much better I die, let me be your carrion, your star, let me have your baby, a little girl, special just for you, I’ll raise her, let her body be yours when the time is right, a little boy you’ll make into your mirror image, teach junior to kill, teach him how to seem harmless, the nice guy, the helper on the side of the road, give all of them a lift, poor girls, tie them up in the back of the car, he’ll hold them down for you, wait outside while you enjoy it, dig the grave so they won’t find the body again. Let me open my legs and my throat for you, the gush of blood your favorite thing, I’ll keep your basement of terrors clean, scrub the stains on my hands and knees, I’ll be the bait you need, the feminine presence that inspires trust, you can hit me hit me hit me and hurt me and hurt me.’ How nice to stick the notes on the gray walls, to wear a ring and to have the visits and their pretty woman hair and woman smells, to paint their faces blue and purple, to have their eyes on the outside, the photos they can take, the trust they give to those that don’t deserve it. How nice to kill them all in your dreams, to tell it to their faces and watch them eagerly drink it in. How nice to have the face of the perfect trickster, promising, a whole life ahead of you, to eat and to kill and to end. To live like an infection that never goes, the name said in the night, why they shouldn’t walk home alone, why alarm systems exist, the man with the knife, with the empty heart. How nice to do it over and over again, and still be considered beautiful.