BlissFacts – Disagree With Me

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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I don’t get terribly easily offended.

I’m shockingly okay with people disagreeing with me on the internet. I like to talk about things when people disagree with me and vice versa. Sometimes I learn things. Sometimes they learn things. Sometimes I change my mind/opinion. Sometimes I don’t.

I just want you guys to know that I don’t expect you all to think the same as I do about everything. I don’t expect us to share all the same opinions. I actually have quite a few people circled whose active posts are their opinion on things which are in direct opposition to my own opinion – and I don’t block them or decircle them because we don’t agree. I read what they have to say.

I learn. I consider.

Sometimes I change my mind.
Sometimes I don’t.

But someone having a different opinion than my own is not a reason for me to get mad.
Someone looking at something differently than me is not inherently offensive.

I don’t get easily offended. I have sometimes ended up becoming friends with people attempting to troll me.

I am okay with you voicing your own non-agreeing opinion in response to my posts. I especially like if you do so respectfully, because just as I assume that people who disagree aren’t doing so with the intention of offending me, please know that my expressing of an opinion different than your own is not an attempt to offend you. What I write is a function of my life, my education, my personal context, my privilege.

I don’t get easily offended.
I welcome folks who will respectfully disagree with me.
I don’t try to offend people.
I will try to learn from you.
Sometimes I will change my mind.
Sometimes I won’t.

But that doesn’t mean that we need to fight about it.

We’re different – and that’s okay with me.

A matter of Great Loss

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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Yesterday was American Thanksgiving. I spent it in the company of a few of my many loved ones. I ate a lot of really tasty food, including sweet potato with marshmallow which my sons are calling Marshmallow Lasagna. I indulged in much win, and sipped cranberry liqueur. I ate apple pie and chocolate pie squished together and topped with whipped cream. I made a mocha with whipped cream.

Naturally I expected a bit of a jump in the scale this morning. In my wildest dreams it remained constant. What I did not expect, natch, is what happened – it dropped.

For the first time in five years, I am below 190.

Despite how much impact it has had on my self esteem, you probably won’t see me post about my weight much. There is far too much focus in my culture on weight and appearance, tying it to our worth as a person. I refuse to consciously contribute to that kind of superficial judgement.

Weight matters to me for health reasons, though. I take after the male line of my father’s side of the family. His father had a heart attack at 40, adult diabetes, and other health concerns. My father has diabetes. My maternal grandmother has diabetes.

I don’t feel that I’m sitting on a medical time bomb, but the hereditary factors are clearly there. Even at my highest weight my cholesterol has been great, but I had a brush with gestational diabetes while pregnant with my first son. Weight is acknowledged as a contributing factor to diabetes. So when you see me posting about this kind of thing, I want it to be clear that this is something that matters for my ongoing quality of life.

I have, without consciously trying to, lost thirty pounds since this time last year.

This morning I am somewhat puzzled – but greatly pleased.

Living On The Edge

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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Note: This post dates from 11/22, was lost (or so I thought) in a frustrating glitch, and has just been recovered from Drafts. Enjoy!)

The frost has come well and truly to Blisstopia.

The width of melting point

The yard, still trying for greenery, is rimed with frost. Ice fae painted the car windows and danced upon the leaves. Stepping out of doors, the bare skin crawls under the cold, causing one to hunch, to try to cover more with the suddenly insufficient coat.

The car sputters, grinds, coming to hesitant life only after a few tries, and fingers that clutch the scraper to clear the windscreen scream for a hot cup around which to wrap. The smell of winter, damply crisp and heavy with the promise of snow, winnows into the nostrils, a taunt of what is to come.

But the sun creeps across the lawn, easing away the time to restore the greenery, beckoning to be played upon even just once more. The car warms, an oasis of heat with steaming hood.

And a warm cup is soon to be had.

When We Die

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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My younger son, who is four and a half, piped up on the way home from dropping off his brother at school:

“When people die, mom, they leave their house behind! And they leave their blood behind, and the pipes their blood flows through too.”

“They do? And then what happens to them?”

“Their body gets digged way down, and their blood gets digged way down, and their bones get digged way down and buried.”

“That’s what happens to the body? What happens to what made them a person?”

“They hear a big *boom*!!! And they die. And their body gets buried, and they vibrate. Then they go into a story.”

“So when someone dies they leave their body behind, and vibrate, and become a story?”

“Yes mom. That is what happens when you die.”

“Thank you, sweetie.”

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My First Time (tasting coffee)

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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I like coffee.

I like it a lot. I remember the first time I had coffee. I was only 7 or 8, and my dad gave me some money from the till and sent me to the little convenience store nearby (crossing two busy streets and rounding a corner, but less than 40 yards away) to get his coffee. One coffee, milk, no sugar. The girl behind the counter was used to me or my siblings showing up for my parents’ coffee by now, but I always felt the need to specify it was for my dad, not for me.

Coffee was a grownup drink. Coffee was mystical; it smelled of wet earth when it brewed, and like some Druidic potion it’s faint acidity would call my parents to rise from the bed. I was a hero in high school because the hour required I rise before them, and I would brew for them. The pot of clean water into the machine, gurgling. The crinkle of the filter, the shhhh of scooped grinds sliding across each other into it, in a nearly peaked pile. The gargling sound and puff of steam as water hit the heater, and the patter like a tiny morning rain of the first drops trickling into the glass carafe.

But that was years later. My first time, I was seven.

I had taken the money and looked both ways until I could cross Country Way, walking past the tire shop, the travel agency, the small local bank on the corner where I had my passbook savings account at the time. Then I crossed the bigger road, large enough to have a turn lane. I ran across it, stuttering back to walking when I hit the sidewalk on the other side. Superstitious, I stepped over the disused and mostly buried rails of the railroad (which got rebuilt and is now in service as a commuter line into the city) because what if some errant bit of electricity found me to complete a current if I stepped on it? I followed the sidewalk around the corner of the building and stepped up into the store. I got the coffee, and I headed back. I held that white styrofoam cup like a chalice, in two hands before me, and the steam seeping out as it softly sloshed. I walked with care, not wanting to spill. The lights were in my favor until I was about four steps into the road, and it seemed simpler to dash forward than to turn around with the cup of coffee in my hands.

I ran, and as I did the coffee slopped and sloshed; some spilled out the top, most catching in the rim but a little falling upon my naked hands. The first pain sacrifice of an angry god, and I was sniffling when I gained the sidewalk in front of the bank. I licked my wound quite literally and then examined the spill trapped atop the flimsy lid. It had to go or risk another burn, but I couldn’t pour it off.

Feeling a thief, an interloper, an infidel partaking of some great holy rite forbade to the uninitiated, I slurped it.

It was still hot, singed my tongue, and I felt that pain more than tastes what I drank, but the flavor lingered as I finished my walk back to put coffee on the counter and the change in the till. The magic words, Milk No Sugar, became mine that day, and while it was many years before I performed the ritual myself, it stays with me still.

 

Nightmare Fuel: Day 21

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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Last night I had that dream again. I have had it nearly every night for so many nights now, and I do not know why it keeps happening.

In this dream, I am walking through the garden, and I come upon the apple tree, and it is heavy with fruit. The apples are red and rich and sway faintly in the breeze, and I draw close and they are so pretty that I reach out to touch one.

When I do, the skin of the fruit splits beneath my fingertips, peeling open to reveal not the flesh of the fruit, but a fanged and toothy mouth with a long tongue that laps a taste of my finger before I can pull my hand away. It has the taste of me then, and begins to shudder and shake upon its branch until its stem snaps free, and it throws itself toward me. I turn to run but I cannot, and the fangs sink into me; different places each night, and last night it was the upper curve of my calf.

It bites deep, and it hurts. I cry out, and I fall, and it releases, only to land upon my waist, biting a deep chunk from my side. I cannot even roll away as it bites again and again – my buttock, my shoulder, my cheek, my breast, my thighs, my thumb, my ankle, my spine. Biting away at me bit by bit and piece by piece until all that is left of me is pain and tears, and only then do I wake.

This morning I told Adam of the dream, and he hugged me and told me it was nothing. Even so, today I will go to the Tree. Just to be sure.

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture, by Burning Shark of DeviantArt.

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.

Nightmare Fuel: Day 20

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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They moved into the house on a Saturday, and despite the worries from the weather reports that it was going to be raining all the while, the Muddletons got all their things moved in with nary a drop upon the carefully taped cardboard boxes. Lara and Merve Yes-That’s-Really-My-Name were relieved once the door on the back of the van slammed shut and the moving men drove away, and they were able to tell Joseph that yes they were all excited about the new house but there was no reason on God’s Green earth why there should be Legos littering the corner of the staircase already. They set up his bed and gave him permission to open any boxes he wanted IN HIS ROOM as long as everything he took out of each box found its way when he was done onto its proper shelf or into one of the plastic toy bins. They had pizza for dinner that night sitting on the wood floor in front of the unlit black fireplace with its high carved wood mantle and called it a picnic, and Lara and Merve got their own bed set up and started unpacking the boxes in the kitchen and the bathroom, respectively. At bedtime they discovered Joseph’s floor a landline of legos and toy cars, but they were too tired to do anything more than to tell him to go to sleep and pick up in the morning. They did not make love.

On Sunday Lara picked through the boxes in the kitchen until she found enough things to make pancakes on the stove, and the dishes went into the sink to soak until she could figure out which box the dishsoap had ended up in. Merve told her with quizzical pride that Joseph must have picked up his room before they all woke up because the toys were gone from the floor when he went to fetch the boy for breakfast. He finished unpacking the bathroom much to Lara’s delight, and Joseph opened another box and found it disappointingly full of clothes instead of toys, which he put away more to get them out of the way of his fun than out of any dutiful sense of helping. He was, after all, only seven. In the garage, Lara found a large mirror that she was sure hadn’t come from the old house, and was very concerned it had been left behind by accident by the old owners, until Merve suggested that perhaps it had been a gift from the real estate agent like they did on those property newbie shows, and actually wasn’t it just right to go over the fireplace between the two old-fashioned lights? They slept with their backs to each other.

On Monday they all went to work and to school. When they got home, Lara found the dishsoap, and Merve hung the mirror over the fireplace. The room, in the reflection, looked quite barren he realized, although he could see the reflection of some of Joseph’s toys through the reflected doorway. Resolving to set the boy to cleaning up yet again, Merve went looking for him, only to get distracted by the task of unpacking delicate odds and ends to decorate the bare walls instead. Joseph complained that he couldn’t find his things, for which his mother admonished him and sent him to his room to unpack more. Lara broke a dish when she was washing and Merve made her a cup of tea before bed and gave her a tissue to dry her tears. After all, it was a big move, broken plates happened, didn’t they? She fell asleep before he got to bed.

On Tuesday, Joseph didn’t answer his parents when they kept calling into his room to wake him for school, and they kept reminding each other to go get him up. When finally they heard the bus come and go, Lara went into Joseph’s room to find the bed unmade, but empty. His floor was still clean, at least, and his shoes were gone. He must have actually gotten ready on his own for once, she told her husband with a wry smile, and sent him out the door with a kiss on the cheek. In the mirror over the mantle she could see how bare the room still looked, as well as several of Joseph’s toys and a plate, and resolved to have a talk with Merve about making sure he finished putting away one thing before moving on to the next. When Merve got home from work, the house was very quiet. No lights were on, and he couldn’t smell dinner cooking. Lara did not answer his call, nor did Joseph. Had there been a parent meeting at the new school? He couldn’t remember and was too tired to drive over there. He ate a sandwich, unpacked a box of linens, and went to bed alone.

On Wednesday he awoke to an unnervingly silent house and crept through it it feeling like he was in the wrong place. Nobody answered him, and his stomach turned unhappily. Where were they? He looked around the still mostly empty dining room and began to mull over calling the police when a bit of movement caught his eye and he turned toward the mirror. There he could see Joseph through the doorway running a car around the bottom of the stairs, and Lara appeared from beyond, looking frightfully haggardly at her husband. Whirling he began to demand why she had not answered him – but there was nobody in the doorway. He turned back to the mirror and saw her there, and she walked past Joseph, past him, right up to the reflection, but she wasn’t between him and the mirror as she should have been. Merve walked close to the mirror, and he could see the tracks of Lara’s tears as she reached out toward the mirror. Her mouth was moving, and he could not make out what she was saying. He reached out too. The crash of the mirror shattering on the floor was very satisfying. He went to work and when the school called asking about Joseph, he told them that his wife was supposed to bring their son to school when the boy missed the bus.

On Thursday, the house was very, very quiet.

On Saturday a pair of uniforms went to the house and found the front door unlocked, a mirror shattered in the dining room, and no sign of the Muddletons any newer than a half-eaten piece of pizza catching flies on the kitchen counter. They called in a missing person’s report, investigate the whole house, and finally left it to be closed up until some sign of the family turned up. The Forensics team was so interested in the lack of fingerprints on the frame of the mirror that nobody noticed the several pairs of eyes peering out at them out of the shards.

Eventually the house was foreclosed and put up for sale, and all the Muddleton’s belongings sold to pay for as much as possible of the loan. Somehow the bank’s realtor missed the oblong mirror leaning against the wall in the garage.

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture, by Burning Shark of DeviantArt.

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.

Nightmare Fuel: Day 19

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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It was a full moon that night, of course. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s kind of foolishness to go walking through the woods at night, but I could SEE, you know? And I’d played in that section of the woods when I was a kid, so I knew it pretty well. A few new fallen down trees here or there, but largely it remained unchanged from what I was familiar with.

But when I came over the ridge to cut along toward the path down the slope on the other side, the big furry creature crouched on all fours on some sunken boulders, head tilted back to look up toward the moon? THAT was new. It was big, and furry, and I could see pointed ears and immediately stopped to go back the way I came (because hi, I’m not a complete moron, I’m not going to fuck with a big animal on its own turf, especially a wolf). I’d gone too far though; when I stopped my sneakers were already on top of the pebbled scree that surrounds the boulders, and the little rocks scraped and scratched underfoot. A person wouldn’t have heard it, but this wasn’t a person.

The ears shot up, and its head swung around – carrying the top half of it with it, and I could see that it wasn’t JUST a wolf. A wolf has a trunk of a body with legs underneath and the head thrust forward upon its neck; this creature had a body far too much like a human’s, heavily muscled in a V-shape like a swimmer, crouching on bent back legs with clawed arms that reached out to curl over the tops of the boulders, its head atop its shoulders. It was all-over fur, and the eyes that glowered at me looked yellowy, set behind an elongated snout that curled back into a snarl.

That was all I saw before I took two steps back under the trees and turned to run. Behind me the snarl bellowed into a throaty howl that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I just ran dodging between trees and shoving back through undergrowth I’d just gone through in climbing up the hill. I didn’t look back, although I could hear its… feet? Hands and feet? pounding into the leaves and the dirt behind me, getting closer. I didn’t look back, I just forgot to look out for one of the newfallen trees. There was a branch that stretched across the path and it sent me flying. I saw a hint of huge shadow looming over mind and for a quick, sure moment I knew that the thing had caught up with me and was about to land on me.

In a way it was lucky that I was falling downhill and landed headfirst on a rock in the path. My skull was cracked open and my brains spilling into the dirt before it landed on my body and started tearing into it. I know this because somehow I was knocked out of myself. I stood there on the path just downhill, and watched as my body slide under the weight of its landing, my skull wrenched further open and a bunch of my ribs cracking. With a snarl like the one it had greeted me with on the top of the hill, it leaned down and sank its teeth into my throat, yanking back to tear it out in a spray of blood and shredding flesh. Its head snapped back and I could see the gobbets of my own throat in its jaws before they disappeared down its gullet, and it bayed triumphantly at the moon that now dappled our bodies through the trees.

I wanted to vomit, but really, how could I do that? It was standing with one foot on my stomach, and after its wild cry it slid back to sink claws and fangs into my middle, yanking already-broken ribs out of the way as it delved into my cavity, jerking loose my entrails to get at the bloody richness of my kidneys and driving one hand up into my chest to find my heart. I guess it did me the favor of spilling my stomach as well as its half-digested contents for me, since I couldn’t. I could only stand there, watching, until it was sated and, with one last snarl in my direction, loped off from the hollowed, shredded remains of my body.

I stayed there by daybreak, wanting to cry when a couple of kids came up the path just like I used to and found my body, screaming bloody murder as they ran back down for help. I watched the emergency services come. I watched my remains get packed up, and I peered over the inspecting detective’s shoulder as he wrote “Death By Misadventure” on the pad attached to his clipboard, quickly repeated by the coroner.

I’ve stayed here for the full month since then, watching hikers and lovers and kids taking the shortcut over the ridge, watching the remnants of my blood sink into the dirt and wash away until the spot hasn’t even a bit of passing interest for stray dogs. People can’t see me. Regular animals avoid where I am standing, but they really can’t see me either. Only that thing could see me.

And you can see me. What’s bringing you up the mountain tonight?

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture, original artist unknown.

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.

Nightmare Fuel: Day 18

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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First I just thought my eyes were dry.

I was at work, and the HVAC system had finally just switched over from the summer air conditioning to the winter heating (The receptionist was joking to one of the IT guys that morning that the maintenance man had to do some sort of secret maintenance voodoo over it) and my eyes were starting to itch. It was just the dry air, I figured. I went out on my lunch break and snagged a bottle of vision, and that seemed to make things a little better whenever I used them.

But when I got up the next day, my eyes were still really itchy, especially the left one. Soon it was itchy even when I put the vision, and rubbing it only seemed to make it hurt worse. I left it alone as much as I could, just trying to make it through the day, because it was definitely one of those days where everyone assumed that an empty spot on my calendar totally meant that I needed my time filled with meetings. When I got home my eye was positively throbbing, and I went to check it in the mirror to see if there was an eyelash trapped. There, between my iris and the outer corner of my eye, there was a tiny dark spot, and that was where it hurt. I closed my eye and pressed gently, just to make sure. Maybe my cornea was scratched or something. I’d call my doctor the next day and get it checked out, I figured.

When I woke up the next morning my eye felt as if it wanted to explode. I rolled out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom, peeling my eye open to see if the spot looked worse. It wasn’t just a spot anymore. It had gotten bigger, and it was like a heart right under the surface of my eye – like a real heart, like should be in your chest, and with veins snaking away from it through the rest of my eye, and it was pulsating, gently. When I closed my eye I could feel it pulsating against the inside of my eyelid.

I called out sick to work and I’ve been hovering between the couch and the bathroom. The veins are getting thicker, and my eye feels weird, like it’s trying to dislodge itself from the socket whenever I have my eye open. And my other eye is starting to itch.

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture, original artist unknown.

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.

Nightmare Fuel: Day 17

Posted on by March 25, 2026
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I wish the weirdest part of my story was how I came to be abandoned in the middle of the Cement Desert. I wish it was how I got dragged into a deal over my head and things went pearshaped and I was sent out into the sun-seared, shadeless waste to die and take that whole story with me. I kind of wish it had succeeded, that I had just walked and walked and walked until I couldn’t walk anymore and then crawled until I didn’t have the energy for THAT any more and then fell asleep until the sun dried me out and flaked off my skin and flayed my flesh and bleached my bones until I matched the cement underneath me.

It almost happened that way. I walked, and walked, and walked, and night was not much better than day because all the sun that spilled across the cement during the day baked heat back up out of it to cook me slowly. It only took two days before I wasn’t even feeling myself sweating anymore because I was just too dry. The headache was massive. I wonder if this was the kind of pain mom talked about when I was small and she had migraines that landed her on the couch in the dark. I felt like there was something inside my skull that was too large for that space. I felt like my eyeballs wanted to burst, and it was hard to focus, even squinting against the light. Not that there was much to focus on. Horizon, just the horizon, walking as if I had any chance in hell of making the far side of the desert. Going back to find my escorts and the bullet-end of their guns was sounding better the further I walked.

I didn’t believe there even was anything at first; I figured the slow-growing lump was just a figment, a what-do-you-call-it? A mirage, that’s right. Like that place in vegas. It was like that place for sure. Walking across the desert, watching it slowly get bigger, it was shining and impossible but it was SOMETHING, that lump, and I couldn’t conceive of not going to check it out. It took a long time to get to, longer than I expected. When there’s that much empty space, it’s hard to tell how far away anything is any more. The only thing that feels close is death.

The sun went down and I slept the night, and got up with my head pounding so bad it could have provided the beat for a Brit techno group, and the first thing I looked for was the lump. Still there, and it actually had a shape, now. It was round on the top, and taller than it was wide. And dark on one side – oh blessed mercy, that meant maybe there was shade, at least early and late in the day! So now I had a goal, and I got up, and I walked.

I walked. I walked.

I walked until it was close enough in front of me that I could see it was made of cement just like the desert. It was rounded as smoothly as the rest of the Cement Desert was flat. It was, as I staggered very close, twice as tall as I was, and with the sun behind me the shade had to be on the other side. I won’t lie, I was totally leaning against it as I made my way around, and I was so out of it that when the rounded surface stopped abruptly, I slid a little. Chevy Chase would been proud. I kept my feet, and oh the shade, the lovely shade! I know it wasn’t really doing anything for my skin, which going by my hands was totally red all over by now, but just being out of the sun made the constant flame of it ease down to an awful prickling.

The lump wasn’t just a lump; it was a half-shell, hollow inside, curved like the interior of an egg, and set into it was a huge shell that was the same color as the statue of liberty, and above it a weird statue that I guess was some kind of mermaid. Its tail was on top, belly against the wall, but instead of being the usual gorgeous chick mermaid (y’know, like Starbucks used to have on their sign before people got offended that she had tits) it was sort of… mostly a fish, long sinuous body and two fins sticking out the side.

The face was all human, though; it was a man, with a wide open grin, very careful even teeth, and it even had hair. Not wild merman hair, but really smooth, slick, side-parted hair that waved just so over the forehead. It was the kind of hair you see on a VP in some office building somewhere, not on a merman statue. But there it was.

“And here you are.”

Given everything else, seeing the mouth move and hearing it talk was pretty much all it took for my knees to buckle and my ass to hit the pavement.

“I imagine you are thirsty, aren’t you?”

It was too bizarre, seeing that metal mouth move and bend like flesh; it was like the animatronics of early 90’s movies, and I wondered if somehow I was being had, except what the hell would be the point of a toy statue way the hell out here? Although even that was more likely than-

“Magic fish, magic bowl, look, do you want some damn water or not?”

“Ye-heh-heh-heh-hehs,” I managed, coughing the word out raspily. I’d barely even opened my mouth in a day, since I realized it was drying me out worse to try to lick my lips.

“Marvelous. Good. So here’s the deal. Make a wish, and then you get the water.”

“I don’t-” I stopped, coughing to clear my throat uselessly. “I don’t wish for the water?”

“No sir, the water comes after the wishing. What way did you come from, anyway?”

I lifted a shaky hand to point. “Two days’ walk that way. Drove me out and dumped me.”

The metal almost looked as if it was melting around his head, the way it shifted to let him nod. “Right then. So what is your wish?”

“I wish…” I looked down at my hands, burned and cracked and thick with sun poisoning. Christ, they looked like effing sausages. I wished I hadn’t gotten in the middle of this mess. I wish I knew how to say no. I wish I’d had a gun of my own when Alaina and Mauricio showed up. “I wish they were dead,” I mumbled sourly, and coughed again.

“Who?”

“Alaina and Mauricio. They work for the Big Girl.”

“Are they the ones that… dumped you?”

“Yeah.” Even as I nodded, the merman’s head went still, mouth opening wide in a weird, yawing grin. There was a sound almost like a burp, and a gout of water burst forth to splash in the bowl, staining the oxidized copper with wet. I could SMELL the water, not a bad smell, but like when you’re a kid going to the seaside and you can’t see the beach or the ocean yet, but you can feel it in the way the wind is cool and damp. It was like that, an impossible burst of wet air in the middle of that cement oven.

I wish I could say I didn’t crawl to get to it, but I did, and dragged myself up on the edge of the bowl to shove my hands in. The water was cool and it was wet and felt so good and yet it HURT in the cracks in my skin and I screamed, and christ if that even wasn’t a wimpy sound, dry and thin and ragged. Then I was able to drag myself up almost to standing – really, I just sort of draped myself over the side of the huge shell-shaped bowl – and shoved my whole face into the water. That hurt too, and I screamed right into the water before backing out. Just a breath, and then I started drinking. Too much, too fast, and my stomach twisted and cramped around it and set it back up. I had to sling my head aside to vomit it out onto the hot cement. Even in the shade it was so hot that where it it, pink-stained, it hissed and began to steam.

That first run slowed me down, then, and I went for a few careful shaky gulps before sitting back down and catching my breath. “I think maybe you’re saving my life,” I pointed out, not really able to think much past the headache beyond pointing out the obvious.

“I am,” the creature grinned, and gouted a little more water out into the bowl. “Here, take this.”

Its mouth yawned impossibly huge, and a Ruger clattered out into the bowl, landing with its nose in the water. “You will go make Alaina and Mauricio dead,” it said simply, and I stared.

“Like hell!”

“You will. Or you will stay here with me.”

“Well, it’s not like I can walk two more days back like this, and even if I do it’s not like they’ll just sit there and wait for me to shoot them!” Even so, I reached a shaky hand in to gingerly pluck the gun from the shell bowl.

“You will.” The creature was implacable, lapsing back into that broad weird grin each time it spoke, and the gun lurched around in my grasp, wrenching my arm upward to slam the nose of it against my temple. “Or you will stay here with me.”

“JESUS CHRIST!” I yelped, my hand shaking, but I couldn’t pull my arm down, couldn’t let go of the gun, and my finger quivered on the trigger.

“You will go make them dead. Then you will come back. I will give you water. And you will grant my wish.”

Which is how I ended up walking back across the Cement Desert, holding myself at gunpoint. I can see the road in the distance, and I can see a car, and the sun is winking off of someone. I don’t even know if it’s them, but I’m going to do it. I will. And then maybe I can get myself before I need to go back there and find out what that thing could wish for. I have a terrible feeling that it’s going to want to leave with me next time.

 

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture by Carabou of Flickr, shared under a Creative Commons license.

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