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I. Drunk and Festering.

In the dim halflight, his toes were the color of dry shell-bone. At the far right of his left foot, the porcelain of skin and nail curved inwards, disrupted by a hint of green reflection that could be traced back to the flashing alarm clock at the bedside. Each toe exhibited a strange flaring and bottlenecking at the middle segment; he remembered a day in middle school when his teacher brought in a plastic skeleton, labeled and grinning, and showed them the small bone-balls and bone-rods of the human foot.

He unfurled long fingers at his toes, halfheartedly, with a rippling motion like tentacles unwinding through water, and they blinked back at him.

"Trancy," Neon whispered, and he nudged the form at his side with a damp elbow.

That was the name of the plastic skeleton: Trancy, named for its blank, eyeball-less stare. It was not, however, the name of the woman, who groaned blearily into Neon's armpit, possibly in protest at the noise.

Continuing to stare at his feet, Neon groped at the woman with one hand, deftly fumbling with goosebump-prickled skin. She sniffed wetly into his side and slid up against him; they lay like that for a while, body heat mingling into a thin net of warmth that cloaked them with skintight heat and dewy sweat.

Eventually, Neon let out a dry cough. "My toes s'are 'ristocrratic," he slurred sleepily, nudging at her legs with a knee. "They beautiful. You're."

The woman tossed away from him, scraping against his knee as she turned. "Mmmph."

"You don't believe m'?"

She rubbed her hair deep into the pillow, eyes clenched shut. Neon stared and gaped, slightly repulsed, as she started to fade into the uniform warm grey of night; her hair twisted and snagged on rounded planes of evening black as her skin darkened and crumpled inwards like the slow falling-out of pollen when a flower is lifted upside down and shaken, hard. "s**t, man," he croaked, and her fading hands reached for him and her snarly dark fingernails grasped at tucks and folds of uncontaminated skin, as in the darkness above those waving fingers (excessive, now, in their elaborateness and the way they looked almost like anemones) two windows of murky light opened, blinked, stared.

Neon stared back, coughed, scrambled backwards like a rabbit. The shutters clicked and closed on the windows, it seemed, and she was moving choppily through the air back down towards her infernal pillow. If he looked carefully, the movements would show in the air in arcs of dim yellow and lucid, spattered green. It was a sickly green, death green, like radioactive goo in Sunday morning cartoons. Years ago, he had read somewhere of green described as the color of fear, and somewhere it was envy, and elsewhere it was simply Nausea (capitalized, Important), but here it was simply the physical manifestation of Neon's shallow confusion, mixed with equal parts cheap beer and the drug-haze of sex.

"--The ******** out of here," he scratched out, at last, and the woman-demon purred into her pillow, sinuous body grinding into the sheets. But Neon was not to be dissuaded; he sprang from the bed, stumbling slightly on the unexpected edge of carpet, and tiptoed towards the door, trembling with nervousness and unexpected adrenaline.

At the intersection of fire-escape landing and city street was a bust of Caesar, and it was towards this statue that Neon navigated his tumbling, stumbling way. All around him was a quiet whistle of wind. The darkness was seeping into his eyelids, painting his vision black, and he found himself tripping on uneven patches of soil and small hard pebbles as all his senses except touch were slowly obilerated.

He could still see Caesar, though; a guillotine of pale, stark white slashed across the noble face, the Roman nose, a single splotch of brightness in an otherwise dank photograph. Neon reached it, stood before the arch of moonlight, stared into the lit-up eyes (dead and stoney), felt along where he thought the lip would be. It was not cold like marble, as he had expected, but warm and fleshy, wet with breath.

The wind picked up to a brisk pace, scraping at his elbows and naked buttocks, whistling about his ears in a high, shrieking monotone. And Neon wormed his fingers into the (stone?) hole before him, brushed past tombstone teeth and a tongue sticky with saliva, fumbled his way back to the uneven molars, edges sanded into dullness, the smooth membrane by tonsils and throat, that gave way so easily and yet sprung back to tautness the instant pressure was lifted. Under his toes were small granules of rock and a few coarse, ashy packets that Neon recognized as cigarette butts, and before him, still, was the curve of moonlight on rock, and twining into his ears, now, was an odd cacophony of chewy vowels and crashing hums; slowly, he could hear again, and slowly, he could smell the stink of sewer and cool freshness of night, and slowly, he began to see.

He removed his finger, scraping against cold marble, and licked it: the fluid was briny, coagulated, spicy, animal.

III. Pass the Pepper?


'Rippling' was the only way that one could describe the motion (algae-like, but brusquely snapping at the ends), the feelings (wavering and unsure), the thoughts in their inconsistent waves. It seemed to Neon that all around him was this rippling, a tide of indescribable proportions engulfing him in an almost-cool stubble of sensation. All about him was a leathery black; he stretched out unseen fingers to feel at the space about him, and felt no wind from his motion, no tactile surfaces, nothing but an overbearing lukewarmness.

"Lights," he found himself chanting, and slowly, a single spotlight lanced down from above, casting a sharp glow at the ground before him, and reflecting a soft light at everything else.

At the center of the spotlight was a stripper.

Surprising, then, that Neon would still stroke at his wrists, reassuring himself with the soft sensation of skin smoothing across skin; unexpected that he would cower away from the woman, completely unaroused; confusing, the way he cast quick, darting glances at the grey blanket of not-quite-dark smothering the scene in muted coziness. Neon felt his heartbeat quicken, heard the quiet ticking picking away at the silence. He thought to himself that the sound cast by the ticking (was it his heart or something else? He carried no watch) seemed to stop abruptly at the edge of the stripper's spotlight, bouncing backwards toward Neon as he stood and stared.

The woman was still dancing, breasts unbared, scant clothing piled at her feet in sad little pools of fabric. Her arms lifted and waved, sedate and controlled, poising at the edge of every motion like a ballerina or a geisha might stop and hover; she turned in small circles, jerky, not in the least fluid. It was sad, Neon thought, that she did not enjoy dancing more, and disappointing that her motions were so uncoordinated.

"S'here, you," he said, words skidding after each other before crashing and blurring in a muddle of vowels, "You don' robot now; you flail, you sink and flutter n' tumble, see, you drape 'cross the music. Don't ROBOT, s**t, jus' ... s'not good, now."

Her fingers flicked at him, one joint at a time, crackling like dry cacti brush, and she began to stretch out her arms as if she were reaching for something.

"DON'T, now. Just tol' you..."

She paid him no heed.

Neon continued to instruct - "Seaweed, like, not a ******** CRUSTACEAN. Crab-scuttle en't it." And he instantly regretted his words, as for the first time, the stripper turned her gaze full onto him; her eyes were blank and bright as if small jeweled suns were hidden behind the lids. When she blinked, her lashes came down in a sharp square of black, blocking the light; she blinked whenever the tips of her fingers curled outwards, the joints straightened and stiff, and opened her eyes again when her mouth pulled down into a frown and her knees bent and her fists clenched.

"s**t, man..."

It occurred to Neon, quite unexpectedly, that the woman was not a woman at all, but instead a horseshoe crab. The muted colors blurred at the edges of his vision as he strained to make out her individual features, reassure him of her humanity, but as he leaned forward, scowling at her elbows and the line of her stomach and those two now unblinking eyes, her outline sharpened and focused and he found, to his surprise, as she crumpled downwards and out, clattering like a bag of bones, that his assumption had been quite right.

The sharp spikes of her carapace lifted in jags like cartoon waves. Across her back was a thin stripe of highlight, and at her mouth, below the eyes, the ridge of shell widened and flared into what seemed to be teeth or fangs or beetle-stingers. Her tail was long and stopped, snapped, three feet down her great, hulking length.

"Crab shoulda never been tha' big," Neon drawled, staggering towards the blunt end of the tail as he eyed the glowing eyespots lining her back; he stooped clumsily at the second-to-last eyespot, gazed down at the broken tail where the spotlight abruptly cut off, turned his head and looked down the length of the great stripe of nothingness to his left. Staked into the firm substance that constituted the ground and curved around Neon's heels was a thin spike of shadow. The end of the tail. It jutted upwards like a ceremonial spear, or a marker-flag, or a single chopstick stabbed upright.

He knew without checking that the horseshoe crab was dead, and lent his breaths and voiceless sighs to the threnody of sea-whisper and air-hum.

These beaches are not unaccustomed to dead bodies. Mute, the sea accepts her dead with a cold saline embrace, dragging back even those jabbering, upright-walking mammals who esteem themselves so highly and think they can escape her. One day, one year, a hundred years or a hundred million, the carbon cycle plods along in its petty pace from day to day, with the whispering ocean as its eternal accomplice. From water we were made, and to water we all shall return... Some faster than others.

These beaches are not unaccustomed to dead bodies. The tide creeps in to meet the pounding rain, reaching for the corpse it can't have, a child grasping at a forgotten doll. Who was she? A hooker on the wrong side of the tracks; a college student who had a drink too many; a housewife with a husband and two children back on the hearth. Anything, now, for the dead are infinitely variable in the way all overlapping sets happen to be: Diverse, rich, and utterly meaningless for they all compress to one dead woman on the beach.

The tide licking up the beach, mouthing driftwood and rafts of kelp, chasing before it moon-white nocturnal crabs in their foraging, reaches seafoam fingers for Neon's toes, doesn't quite make it, oozes back down at gravity's behest. Another go, then; it rallies in the susurrus of a thousand particles of sand climbing over each other, numerous and indistinct as the stars in the night sky. Rain pocks the sand and water alike, throwing them into disarray and kindling sparks and flashes of luminescence out upon the deep. Here, and there, and there, in foxfire (fauxfire) trembles of pale green and blue, streamers that have lately begun drifting further and further north on a warm and murderous current--creatures as infinitesimal as the sandgrains whisper in lightpulse and fluorescent-murmur, "I'm here, I'm here, I'm here..."

So numerous are they that even when a wave retreats from Neon's unsteady perch, the sand is left for a moment wreathed in swampy green and sickly blue, glowing unsteadily until the rain washes it back out to sea. Some refuse to go, though; some, a whole mass of robin's-egg blue wreathed in pale gold, do not wish for the ocean to reclaim them.

Speckled and tremulous and fragile as spun glass, this some is an inconsequential mass of tiny eggs with the power to change lives in them. Here, then, to spite Will, to spite Neon, to spite fate itself, change waits in deceptive jellied capsules.

Will it be the blue pill, or the red?

This is a moose.

Alces alces, large and long-nosed, all gnarled shoulders and stretched legs. Antlers, maybe - branched like stories or trees - or maybe not. These are the hamadryads of dark forest, magnificent in their girth and graceful strength. These are the spirits that haunt the willows and aspens, grooming at shoots and picking at water lilies with nuzzles like shadowed roots. They are ancient gardeners, quietly daring, dying and living with dignity.

Moose are not accustomed to the dark confines of Neon's stomach.

Understandably, then, the one pawing its way through Neon's pancreas is upset. Dripping with emulsifier, acidic with trychopepsin and HCL, it snorts and tramples and hooks and snags at the tight muscle at Neon's abdomen, hurls itself at the redraw edges of his liver, rips through skin and tissue with horns and hooves and incisors. It tears against the peristalsis of Neon's esophagus, rages at the sphincters, beats up drips of bile at the junction of pharynx and epiglotis, grinds and pounds at flesh. Neon can even hear the dull thum, thum of bone against tissue.

He rolls over, eyes clenched shut, and gags. A sticky gelatin of eggs and egg-juice spews out like blue vomit.

Never again, he thinks to himself, choking at the hirsute bitterness at his tonsils. But it is a conditioned reaction, automatic and meaningless.

Neon flops bonelessly into the sand and waits.

Soon, the painful blaze of daylight - abnormally whitehot, as if the earth was twice as close to the sun - starts to waver and fade back to normacly. His vision is dragged back into him, inch by hardwon inch, shred by ******** shred, as the moose wheels and bucks like a rodeo bull and his guts twist and balance like a rodeo trull and his head throbs in rhythm with their mad, winding dance.

"Where the hell am I?"

Spitting sand from his cracked mouth, Neon levers himself up into a sitting position, stares around at the rolling waves and the quiet dunes and the eggs. Everything but the body, anything but the glazed eyeball, blank and staring and bulging slightly.

He picks up the eggs, douses them with nearby saltwater, cups them in his hands. Drizzles wet grit into his curved fingers, is overcome by a sense of responsibility.

It'll pass, he thinks, ignoring his splitting headache and the moose. Everything does.

The eggs twinkle in his hands like pieces of sky.

---

It takes a long time to get home.

He swings around poles and darts between buildings, avoiding the busy corners and curbsides; Neon tiptoes through alleyways still foggy with dusk and scrawls footsteps across backyards. In the morning blur, his nudity is prominent, shameful. He curves into himself to hide from the glares of streetlamps. There are no observers of his shame, but the feeling remains.

When he finally gets home - when he finally slips from the sliver of backstreet-shadow and dashes across the sidewalk, startling pigeons and the grocer, to duck into the doorway of his store and fumble with the doorknob and pit spittle-dotted curses at the locked door and push and pull and rattle at the old rickety frame until it slides open just that little bit - when Neon finally finds his winding way back to his apartment, it is almost six. Shops have started to leak life from behind still-locked doors; his neighbors open their windows, conserving electricity, to air out their rooms and hang laundry and begin the gentle chattering chit-chat of the day. No time is to be wasted - Neon plops the eggs into a nearby receptacle and proceeds to pull clothing over his sandy skin. Fifteen minutes, and he's done getting dressed. Three more spent brushing his teeth, and with a rake of fingers through salt-encrusted hair, he's set to go.

There are only twenty steps from his apartment to the shop, and he takes them in flying leaps, pivots around the cash register, knocks books willy-nilly, dives towards the open/closed sign with a silent apology to the resting moose, flips the sign and punts the door open and sets the little bell a-ringing -

- the sign, dammit, he groans, and flips it again, this time to 'OPEN' in red block letters -

- just as Smithins opens his shop windows with a rattle of plastic.

"Mornin', Smithins," he calls.

Smithins looks up from his flowers. "How are you, Har-old-Hen-er-y-Mich-a-el-Vid-a-lis-Pro-pei-ter-of-Books-and-All-Things-Literary?" he drones. Each syllable perfectly matches the next in rhythm and intonation.

No matter that Harold is Neon's father's name; no matter that Neon has absolutely no idea what 'Propeiter' means but suspects it to be incorrect nonetheless. It's the first greeting of the day, and the moose has gone to sleep with the headache, and his guts are calm and languid like seaweed, and the eggs are safe upstairs in a rather suspiciously new container - "Fantasic," Neon shouts back and finds that - for once - he absolutely means it.

((aphy's IN A BONNNNNNNNNG ))

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