Author's Note: Brand spankin' new—no other way to explain it. Also, this is my honest attempt at a first-person narrative because I ain't no h8r.

THE ION CHANGE

April cruelty.

They marked their days, portioned one off from another. Grouped it all back together in slinky conglomerations—and it didn't even work; sometimes the days jumped. No one could sort their shit out and, by hell, they tried. Did they ever try! Sometimes it made me laugh, that futility of effort. But they stumbled over their own shoelaces. Um . . . I-I think 'two' plus 'two' . . . maybe . . . might equal—uh, 'four'? I'm not sure. Don't quote me on that. Disclaimer. . . . Futility of effort.

It reminded me of self.

Experience rain through my eyes—a gradual transition from plane to plane. That doomed planet, which encircled a star—a measly star, not even a significant one—roiled and tended to collide with the sphere of my existence. Most couldn't pervade it, but occasionally . . .

So: the rain. As it thundered down on me just as indiscriminately as everything else, my plane punctured, dented. When it passed into the realm of the one belonging to the slaughter, it ghosted away. I didn't think I'd ever felt the rain. I didn't want to. I was not so pathetic.

But watching everyone scatter themselves across the world, stain that place with their hands and their blood and their scientology and their mischief, all shot through with heavy distress, lured me to a standstill at the exact moment everything shifted to a different realm.

Clear to the point of bleakness, austere particle-driven microbial decadence, sick to rot to core, the rain persisted; though its playground now screamed. Not a single voice touched and—because my ties here fade—dragged their fear-shaped distrust violently along my countenance, causing an Infernal mirror to turn, to gawk, to gape, to stare, where I could not. The noise appealed to me. A visual aspect whitened the spectral onslaught of their color, catastrophe, cataclysmic microchasm. Human destruction is lust. Now and always. Then, too. Singular, indefinite lust with a fixed pattern, a fixed profile, which closely resembled the skewered metal, all gnarled and knotted and glued by decapitations, amputations, severances . . .

They would count the dead later. I figured an approximate coupla hundreds. So easily they mottled, dissolved into the nitrogen, the sulfur-eaten snow. Disassemblance, dissemblance, displaced. A million and one of their words to my six and six. Their expression caused this.

I dropped to the disrupted cement of the street to get a closer look, investigate the sex-sick dissolution that they dripped into the autonomic globe . . . disturbing the centre, the heart, the raison d'être. (Hehe, picked that one up from a woman once with a brain like vacuum-folded animalia.) A protection hub, left slightly more exposed than the millisecond before. Its fires could swallow me whole but I wonder what would happen. Nothing too terribly advantageous, I'd thought. I knew nothing.

They knew less.

The faults were mere fissures but ran wild, unheralded, through the streets. A demolition force had cracked it like a soul, cracked it right open; I saw myself between its jaws. Not enough to lock the railed train inside, though. Pity, that. Pithy.

Swarms of people drew lines across the fractures in half-stunned attempts to free the sick and the brave. So many crushed skulls, mangled limbs, slip-hungry groans, all silence. Everything was silence.

It had a name. Everything did now. Nonsensical things. Medicinal hubbub. A city's railway. Anyway, I didn't remember. However, I could recall the silence. Even the rain had no effect on me. I couldn't feel anything. Sight, only: flood gave rise to blood, tunneled it out into the gutters, underground, safestreets, home, the tragic ocean. Blood in the water. Water in the blood. All gone but for the dark arcs left to spatter the dead from the ceiling—broken ceiling, destroyed ceiling; tatters, everything: tatters and silence. Actually, I thought the ceiling melted into the rails, too. Blocky miss-matched patches of buildingstuffs—bricks, cement, doom—amputated an uncouth number in itself. Watching from the split ground, I supposed I could take a closer investigatory glance, but what would the use be? You see these things everywhere there's silence here.

You could see these things everywhere here.

And anyway they made a point of clearing enough of the rubble both inside and outside of the building, where I was. Quite quickly. More entrancing: the concept of depuration. Sticky matter interwove itself between dryrock, cementstock, woodlock. So sticky. Not pulling off in strings but taking on the form of adhesive. Most of the problems in clearing out debris came from that—peeling brick from marrow from brick. But I think, primarily at any rate, that they somehow discovered about as much of themselves in the wreckage as I did: and I saw their selves, all right. What was it? Raison d'être. All of it, compacted into dense little pools of light, slinking through the blood and bone and brain . . . How many trainwrecks, I wondered, had reached such a derailing force?

Author's Note: So… confused? :]