I understand many things about life, how it comes and goes and how it exists in the present—in thought and in the unseen. I have the guide of perfect discernment—an immaculate compass of the ages etched into my bone and burned into my breath by a creature of creation long hidden from the eyes and knowledge of man. With such a tool, I have access to wisdom concealed from the wise. I know patterns, desires, decisions, even thoughts of those I encounter. I know their steps, their actions, their words even before they themselves have acted them out. I am a weapon to the world—a weapon wrought without contact, unhindered without touch.

Every day I awake and dress in the same clothes. I brush my hair the same. I eat the same foods. I look at the same photographs that slowly, bitterly slide from their importance in my past. And then I set out into the teeming populations of damnable promise.

I walk through markets and malls, amusement parks and stadiums. I wait, watch, and wonder at futures to be and futures to be destroyed. I marvel at the potential of all things good and all things terrible; I marvel at the possibility of altering one to the other and the other way around. Life is an untrustworthy machine laded with levers, switches, and pulleys. There is nothing definitive—nothing certain. Promises are broken, love is impure, and not a single soul can stand by its beliefs.

In these places I thrive and draw energy beyond measure. One life after another I manipulate and cut off from its source, letting it waste away as an ephemeral particle of dust.

(Listen to the rest)

I thought I had told the Doctors nothing but the truth regarding my wounds, yet their doubt in my words led me to not wholly believe in those insects of memories crawling behind my eyes. They wanted to know how the rings of flesh were once missing at the wrists of my bloodless arms and how a ring of flesh was once missing at my neck without the décor of crimson.

Indeed, anyone should wish to know such answers, so I told them the truth—the only truth I knew and the only story I knew how to tell. But the Doctors would not receive it. Every week they came and withdrew me from my cell and every week they asked me the same questions. Mainly their probing led to the defining of the role I played concerning the wounds, but my account did not involve any of my doings; I was a victim, and especially not of myself.

As the weeks came and went, I began to divulge less and less of what I remembered when the Doctors came to inquire of me.  For one thing, I realized that the florescence of my details gave ignition to punitive results, and second, the line between nightmare and reality had become a pool of mixed elements, leading me astray from the substantial qualities of confident testimony, and beyond that, cognizance. I would rather have not remembered anything regarding the incident at all; that would have saved me great torment, or at least given cause to administer it.

***

The wounds they found upon me as I lay on the floor of my prison cell were deep—almost all of the way to the bone. They were circular cuts—rings: one on each of my wrists and one around my neck. There was no bleeding; the wounds were completely clean as if those rings of flesh had been removed by teleportation and the fissured blood vessels somehow instantly sealed.

(Listen to the rest)

I found the perfect summit to erect the altar for my sacrifice. It was sunken down in a valley surrounded by mountains of tremendous size. Instead of aiding in the formation of the valley, this mountain housing the summit I eyed stood independent within the valley, standing against erosion of age old time—an oddity of nature.  As I stared at this gem of existence, my heart raced with gladness. I knew there was no better place to proclaim and exalt the One Whom I Followed.

I had walked hundreds of miles in search of such a destination—miles covered by the scourge of rock, plant, and tree. Not a single civilization was remotely nearby; there were not even wandering nomads, and so certainly there were no roads, paths, or trails. My journey was dominated by coarse, seemingly impassable terrain. And all through this traveling, I carried with me an immense prisoner wrapped in a thick tarp tethered to my back that writhed in such ways that sent ripples of exhaustion through my limbs. It longed to kill me even in its capture, and it often came close. Every time I propped open its immurement of tarp to pour it water or feed it food, I cringed terribly at this thing that laded me; it only avoided death by the facet of my purpose.

(Listen to the rest)

There is such a thing as the chaos of fate—an endless-fingered glove, a maze of only dead-end paths. And there is such a thing as living separated from life—not by the escaping of death, but by the living outside of life in a place where its wholesome reaches fail. There is such living and there is such a place. The living is like being a dog: aware, emotional, but void of self purpose. The place is like a beehive—active, inconstant, volatile.

Life is linear: it runs from one point of time to another while immuring its contestants in a singular transition at any given moment, placing them on a one-track outcome: fate. There are boundaries in place—rules. There cannot be multiple futures or multiple endings. There cannot be purpose beyond what is attained in a two-dimensional timeline. But if not governed by these rules, then what? Life is these rules, and so to be outside of these rules is to be outside of life, and this uncertain place of living outside of life is the chaos of fate.

***

The chaos of fate was my home, and had been since I ingested into my body the myriad of Obstructions of Fate from the Devoted Man’s Bazaar. Life disgorged me in a mass of unscrupulous discord. Every particle in my body—down to the most miniscule—was pitted against every other particle in my body. There was a battle within me; every part and piece of me wanted to go a different way, make a different choice, follow a different fate. By these things alone, I was not human; I was Knave—a servant to pandemonium.

(Listen to the rest)

The articulate sound of the school bell’s conclusive note awoke me from my hazy hell. It came as if with swift reckoning—a domino effect to my distant self that lived the same moment fractions of seconds earlier and fractions of seconds later. Perhaps even a transfer of consciousness occurred, shifting me between universes via the cracks of unnoticeable time.

After the ring faded, I could not even recall what I had been speaking about. But before the children in my kindergarten class could leave, I quickly addressed them and gave them my tidings. Then they were gone, and I was left alone to the quandary of my day.

I was a good teacher, for the most part, but the days were beginning to drag. On and on they went, baffling my orientation within the world and my permanence within my thoughts. There was nothing within me to hold me still and keep me in tangibility. There was not a child that deserved my best; there was not a future that deserved my wisdom. I was fading away.

(Listen to the rest)