kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"InAUniverseOfHisOwnCreation.0"

words

The door opened--long blond pig-tails and an uplifted silhouette meant it was Amanda, night shift clerk extraordinaire. Clerkstress, she liked to call herself. Well, she could stress anything she liked of his. Any time. He didn't care how old she really was--wrinkles faded to nothing in the darkness. And it was all a dream, anyway. He liked the experience of her, how she'd modified herself according to the California lifestyle. And the cigarettes, the tar coating her lungs--it was like making love to the tarmac, closest he'd yet come to transformation.

She didn't know--no, she didn't think--she didn't think one way or the other about his existence. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he was not. That's how he liked it. And she liked it. Her life had ground her reflexes down to a dull ache; Amanda was too tired to hope, too tired to fear. Their occasional struggles were barely recognizable blips of pleasure on her corkboard of a soul.

For a moment, he wondered--she hardly knows I'm here. I wonder--wherever I am--is there someone there to give me these little blips of pleasure, lift my scarred and broken body from its bed of ash? And does it matter?

He sleeps, so he's surmised, as she does. Does she, then, fantasize as well, off in a world of her own devising? Did she, one day, somewhere, wake up with inexplicable superpowers? The walking dead, his clerkstress--and him.

Five minutes, and the tussle is finished. She freshens up against the wall and returns to the front with supplies for stocking. He flies out the window, searching for meaning in a universe of his own creation.