Anti-Narrative One

I can’t go anywhere anyway.

My eyes rest on each other with an immutable resonance, like the cat’s eyes looking into them, resting on top of each other in an etheric wordlessness that detonates in crashes of sound that do not scare the cat or myself.

There are no people and they are all dead.

The cat can never leave.

The ground can never open up, breathing out interlocking lacework patterns.

A man sleeping on his back awakens and is shot in the head by a man waiting by him with a pistol.

A man reading a book is thrown against the wall in a violent boredom.

A group of UAVs circle above a kettle of hawks circling above an all-encompassing void.

The carnival comes to town.

Windshield wipers commit mortal sins in full knowledge of the consequences.

The writhing braid of snakes.

The book writes a book about people.

They get married.

A long time ago there was a prince who went out to see the world. He snuck out of the castle in the dead of night, because he knew his father, the king, would not approve. Dressed as a commoner, he hopped on an old horse and made his way slowly on the road and was not harried by the guards. Soon after sunrise he reached a small town. He tied up his horse outside an inn and called out to get the innkeeper’s attention. Eventually the innkeeper, an old woman, hobbled out and offered him a meal, and the prince gave her a few copper coins for it. He had not brought any silver or gold with him, for fear that it would reveal his noble origins. There were a few other men eating at the inn, apparently having spent the night there. The prince overhead them talking with the innkeeper of news from the town that they had come from. It seemed that a princess from their kingdom was being kept under lock and key by the king. None of the travelers knew exactly why she was being treated this way, but the rumor was that she had tried to leave the castle on her own in a disguise, but had been noticed by a guard who caught her and informed the king. The prince felt sorry for the princess as he heard her story, and, having no real aim for his travels, made up his mind to seek her out. He finished his meal and left the town quickly, asking some townspeople of the way to the kingdom the men had talked about and found that it was about a week’s journey away. On the way the prince faced many difficulties, small bands of robbers, wolf packs in the forest and difficult roads where he had to dismount and walk beside his horse for miles, but he overcame each obstacle in turn, either with his sword or his cunning. He had little to eat and was often hungry, but he was surprised to find that this hunger, which was new to him, did not bother him greatly. Finally he made it to the kingdom. He went to the market and filled his belly with bread and ale and then went back just outside the city to sleep under a tree in a secluded corner. When he awoke he felt reinvigorated and slipped back into the town on foot, leaving his horse to graze. He found some merchants drinking wine and started a jovial conversation with them. After a while he inquired about the princess, saying that he had overheard some rumors about her on his travels. In hushed tones the merchants told him that nobody had seen or heard of her since she was locked away, but that it was thought that she was being kept at the top of the northern tower of the castle. They also warned the prince not to speak about her unwisely, as the king’s spies were all around. The prince set out for the castle straight away and managed to get past the guards. When he was inside, he found a closet and hid inside. He took off his worn out commoner’s garb and put on more luxurious and princely clothing which he had kept in his pack. Leaving the pack in the closet he then strode out in the open and was not bothered by any of the servants of the castle, who must have assumed he was a visiting lord or knight. After wandering around the castle for a while he found himself by the bottom of the north tower and when he was denied access by the guard, he drew his dagger and cut his throat quickly. On the way up the spiral stairs he slew several more guards who were too slow to respond with their long, heavy halberds. When he reached the top of the tower he found a heavy oaken door with a great lock upon it, but because the hinges were exposed he was able to dismantle them. The huge door flopped open awkwardly to reveal the princess inside, cowering behind her bed. The prince was so amazed at her beauty he was hardly able to speak. The princess hazarded a glance in his direction, and, seeing the prince in his magnificent attire, wiped away her tears and stood up smiling to receive him. He went over to her and, drawing his sword, sliced off her head in a single blow.

The Sun

The sun’s thoughts are strewn among its magnetized plasma whirlpools. Chiefly, it worries about paying bills and taxes, for the solar mind has by chance accreted a set of experiences and perceptions that is much like that of a low-class, partially employed, personal trainer down to his last three clients. He drinks a cup of coffee in his dingy apartment as he stares at a pile of bills trying to come up with a strategy to pay the most pressing ones while ignoring the others. He is interrupted in his strategizing by the distinct notion that he is in fact a tremendous ball of fusing gases releasing untold amounts of radiation, much like the one that has recently risen to be framed quite nicely in his window. He takes a sip of coffee and meditates on that idea for a moment, and decides he doesn’t know how he should act on that information, should it actually be the case. As one current of convecting plasma that constitutes his reality converges with another he is presented with the thought that this notion of his is at best a kind of psychotic solipsism and doesn’t help him at all. It’s worse than that even, because the notion that he is a sun is slowly becoming stronger still, despite that he knows it is decidedly not in his best interests to have this belief as it will not pay any of his bills or taxes, which are already overdue. He takes another, longer sip of coffee, trying to ground himself on something concrete before him and while that coffee has its characteristic warmth and stimulating effect, the notion continues to reverberate in his mind loudly. It deconstructs itself and reconstructs itself in a variety of convincing and logical proofs until suddenly it is not just a strange notion, but an obvious truth that he had never quite comprehended until this odd epiphany when he finally put everything together. Unfortunately for him, he had not divined this truth by somehow perceiving the surging plasma that did actually constitute his every thought and perception, because there was no way for such information to be transmitted to him, as he was just a pattern within that plasma. If, somehow, he was able to perceive the very stuff that held within its vortexes the information of his mind, his mind would cease to be a mind at all and return to being ordinary, un-self-reflective plasma. No, he was just psychotic. Soon, after he had neglected to pay his bills and taxes, authority figures came to his door and, quite reasonably judging him to be insane, since they found him gazing transfixed at the blue flame of his gas stove, emaciated and naked, talking about stellar fusion cycles, they took him to a state psych ward. After many years of therapy and a number of different medications, he was finally disabused of that original notion that he was the sun. He was transferred to a halfway house and got a job in a machine shop that didn’t pay too well. He still had to worry about his bills a lot of the time, but not as much as before, maybe. Otherwise he was OK. He worked that same job for a trillion years, at which point the convection currents in the sun that generated his mind destabilized, but when that happened, he never knew it. Not even the slightest notion.