Folded Space - Mapping Unexploded Ordinance

There were giant squid for 27 days in August & September. My bathwater multiplied into oceans when I blinked. It was always dark, and the moon followed the same pattern as reality. I built fear into unknown shapes, several, they worked in unison; coiling around my limbs, ribbon filaments that moved as invertebrates. Tendon and muscle, without joints.

Always night, I step in a puddle it is an ocean, the rain starts and floods everything. The sinks fill, sea level is mine every night. 27 days of it.

I had these enemies and at the beginning the moon was small, I had no light, treading seas that exploded moments prior. I introduced myself to panic, I said hello. At this came motion beneath me, and the touch of smooth flesh, wrapping around elements of my body, and they touched my genitals, tightening around abdomen. Underwater, gagging and blind. REPEAT.

The time I spent in the agreed upon continuity found me getting dirty, as I had been avoiding liquids, and more irrational. I stopped brushing my teeth, no liquid soap. No bar soap with liquid catalyst. No one came near me, my odor was weaponry. Work had no more use for me and soon I slept outside sprawling in beds of dirt, hugging it to me. When the rains came, I was forced to use pills to battle sleep. But I could not win, and again I was killed.

And I struggled on trying not to die, to be drowned, strangled, and chewed, concurrently. My only comfort the patches of dry earth I found to sleep in, feeling strong. They killed me anyway, the moon opening now, them becoming visible, only to disappear. They had ways of creating their own shadows. I saw only the stray pieces that flashed outside the black cloud they projected. No weakness, and in their element, I was continually murdered.

I did not know how many times I could die, the deaths were growing tedious. Maddening. I tried to kill myself, at first water, as far down as I could go and did not go back up. My skull was just beginning to go numb, and it was on me soon eating most of my leg. Suicide was failure and I was truly fucked.

I woke up, walked to street and waited for a car. Fifty miles an hour, one was coming. I took a step, was off my feet for a few seconds, then face first, onto the road, with my legs coming down over my head, bent backwards, in half. I wanted it done, but it wasn't. There was no pain, nothing broken, get up, walk back inside. I took a knife out of the drawer and into my stomach. Nothing. My gun tried to put a bullet into my face and failed. I appeared doomed only to die with my nightmares, and now I knew. I needed as much light and emaciated earth as I could find my element and strength. The desert and the open skies followed the lunar cycle to the desert near the canyons and rock formations. My savior smiled back, parched and beautiful. The sun was falling. I gathered rocks and laid them out into humans. I took position among them. No water for miles. I closed my eyes.

The moon was bright overhead when I heard it coming, the first drops of rain beginning. It had come in on storm clouds that were fast closing in on the moon and casting great shadows towards me. The downpour started, attempting to flood me out. I stood and the long dead land resisted, shifting enormous tectonic plates, the water running between them. I turned to the stones. They formed and rose with me as it fell to the ground gasping and flailing parts. We stood over it, a feeble spray of ink marking paths in the defiant soil. A pile of pale flesh shivering and caking with dirt. I took a rock to one of it's eyes. The others long appendages from it and threw them to the sky. The fear was gone, I beat my fists on it. The rain stopped. The others backed away, howling and ripping everything from inside it's shell, I was covered in fluid and bits of organs. Again I turned to the stone men and we lifted the giant husk. We carried it to the rock formations and dropped it. The stone men dissolved back into the landscape. I climbed onto the shell and smiled. I waited for the sun.