After Grid

There's cruelty behind his eyes. he's a peevish little man and I can't stand that. I won't have it. I won't tolerate it. It's a prominent shadow Sophie and I'm surprised at you that you can't see it. Aire's voice seemed like it was very much coming from inside of a box as Sophie turned the phone to face the ground, She had her trapped inside a conference call and the app itself wasn't the best. Sophie turned the phone back upright just in time to hear Aire say "Smug Little Bastard" He talks like he has a fucking fan base like you're a groupie like you're one of his fucking groupies Soph Sophie watched the people boarding the T through the train window then focussed a bit back on her own reflection. Her vision blurred into the blue light coming from her phone, "I need him Aire".  'yea, well the whole fucking world does, I think, if you listen to him_ he's pretty much the best thing since sliced brea...

  The Silhouette became an animated grey shadow from out of nothing as if a projector had turned on and was animating a form made of dust. The face looked startled, then focused on Sophie as it spoke "I don't have much time" Sophie sprang backwards out of her chair and hit the floor running on all fours, her arms knitting the floor behind her like a crab until she bumped into a row of folding metal chairs. The lit form of particles spoke again, this time more resolute in its speech and less pixelated. It turned and looked directly at Sophie now huddled in a corner behind a heap of chairs and continued "I have managed to create enough of a surge to get this message out, my packet will be lost completely if I use full emulation so this is a low format transmission."  Sophie steadied herself by holding the leg and seat of the metal chair as she managed her own leg out from under herself, then plopped back down as the apparition continued. "You have a chance to...

 fade in two leaves wrestle and hover close to the ground wildly  fighting their way out of the shadow and dirt into the side of a rain drenched highway and up into the wind. They fall violently back down in a gust of passing cars then dance and scrape a path along the cement through speeding cars, over yellow dotted line, over the reflection of flashing blue lights mirrored in the puddles, through a  pair of black shoes a set of legs wearing black pants, under a fire truck and into a crowd of more legs and shoes, coming to rest and pressing themselves against a bloody torso just as the the hand wearing a rubber glove had raised the sheet. Muffled voices seem to fill the bucket that lay roughly about 100 feet away and the shadow that safely held that bucket and its contents intermittently lit up with the reflected light coming from the steady stream of rubbernecking traffic did nothing but overemphasize the gruesome details of what must have happened to the poor soul that...

  Tobias never had a sense of belonging. When he was a child the other kids always made fun of him for being different and he carried that into the framework of his reality in this world. He could never shake the fact that he wasn't the right person for his own skin.  On October 3rd, 2021 at 3:45 one beautiful fall afternoon, however, very little of what was the person named Tobias BlackElk remained as he lay a broken and mangled heap in the road. The delivery truck that had hit him remained almost pristine, parked out of the way of traffic with its hazards on. Tobias had been mercifully covered with a drop cloth that the driver found in the back of his cargo hold and only the dusting of some brush and leaves competed with the muffled sounds of a distant police radio and delivery driver recounting the accident. What was left of Tobias's consciousness drifted away towards the west. His thoughts carried him past the heap covered in dusty drop cloth, and beyond the huddled men, d...

  My feelings f    or you  are         as g   o      n e   as      a s   w i  r l       i       n g lea f                                                      In the Wind Tobias read the note and stared blankly into the blur of crowd beyond him.  He had been sitting on the patio at the cafe for over an hour waiting for Julia to show and the server that brought him his first attempt at a Latte mocha swirl was now leaning against the cafe building with her arms folded, glaring. He was semi-conscious of her "I hate you_ why won't you leave or just die" look as his attention drifted back towards his cup of fluff and crumpled napkin. The heap that he was looking at had found his shoe with a slight gust of early October afternoon and bro...