Azazel:9/7/25:Key West
This place is sweat and bruised fruit.
You’re holding a bruised peach, it smells intoxicating, saliva pools in your mouth and you hold it in the hollow of your tongue. Beneath the sweetness there is rot, but you’re on the hunt, the twin-backed beast of hunger, you don’t care. You can already feel your teeth sinking into the fuzzskinned fruit.
Pink.
Edge.
You push your thumb into the brown spot and it’s warm. Rot does that, produces heat. Entropy is an engine. You can feel the stringy bits of peachflesh rub against your thumb’s nervy skin and slide past, leaving slime trails.
This skin memory will stay with you.
You pull your thumb out and now there’s a gaping hole in your peach. Gooey rot has erupted over the edge, a pulpy lahar oozing away from the caldera. You’re looking at that hole and you’re thinking, my tongue would fit in there.
Do you dare devour the edge of decay?
Hurricane’s coming.
August:Heaven is a Memory Hole
I am whole again. Tongue and intestines back where they ought to be. Evelyn has been in an ill temper since this morning as I remembered where I’d seen her “yoga circle.” Hellbunny1, that rascal, would burn them into the hardwoods and cause the Writer apoplexy. Those were amusing days. I am forgetting, it seems. Perhaps that is the purpose of this place, to make you forget what you were, to change you into a quiet, complacent… what? What are we here?
I used to kill things. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I should be here. I do miss that black, furry ball of fury. Sweet and salty Hellbunny. I wonder what ever became of him. We had brought him to the Circus when we gave up everything we owned to get rid of me.
I was quite troublesome. Much like Evelyn is now….
What if I, joined her? I had powers, I opened portals to Hell, it was I who summoned Hellbunny. I could find those dark tendrils of life again. Let them surround me and work through me. I could create that mischief I once did, only now with my wretched wife by my side. Or let her take the lead, she’s quite spirited. Perhaps we could, possibly, by some chance learn to tolerate each other through this common exercise. I’d like to get my memories back, get my self back. I was a ghost longer than I was a living man.
I sit here on the promenade with a spot of tea, watching people walk by and I wonder, could I siphon energy like I used to? The Administrator says changing locations once you’re settled is unlikely, so what’s the worst that could possibly happen?
Perhaps I could… try.
Rebecca:9/7/25:Deadwater
Miriam is in hysterics demanding that I fly with her to Florida in time to meet the hurricane. I don’t know what kind of insane person flies TO a hurricane. With their child? But I guess it’s me.
Her fevers and night terrors are the worst they’ve ever been. The ER doctors told me she shouldn’t be able to survive the temperatures she’s reaching. They wanted to hold her for observation, do more tests, maybe admit her. But I don’t think she’s ill. This is something else. My little girl is bellwether. There is fire inside her that glows brighter the more urgent the impending trouble is.
I’ve talked to her father (Ted-father, not Mal). I did not tell him that she thinks her real father is there and that he needs help. I just told him that maybe we’ll get there and she’ll see nothing is wrong and it will cure her somehow. He’s reluctantly agreed.
I’m purchasing tickets.
Miriam says we need to be in Key West in three days.
I feel too light to be living.
I feel too light to be alive.
I feel too light to be decaying.
I feel too light to be darkness.
I feel too light to have a history.
I feel too light to have a future.
May the devil take my being and burn it down to ashes.
I feel too light to be ashes.
