a conspiracy of the universe

<sub>Would you like to hear a secret?

No one in hell is really dead.</sub>




The projector runs in the dark theater, rapid click-click-click blurring into a whirring like the ten-times-a-second beat of a mouse's heart and swirling sound-waves into the silence. She cups her hand out in front of her, staring at it fixedly, and not at the dusty beam of washed-out light that throws an image onto the screen. From her periphery, all she sees is red, cherry-red on black, but she ignores it, looking instead at the mouse in her hand, tiny buzzing heartbeat in her palm, pulse-pulse-pulsing its throb away so quickly. She places fingertips on her own heart, and ever-so-slowly, she feels them sink through her skin and pierce her sternum, until beneath the whorls and ridges beats the slow steady lub-dub of her own heart. She compares, staring at the mouse in her hand with such an intensity that she's surprised it doesn't melt away, and then suddenly it does, leaving nothing but a vibrating little heart and the tangled threads of a tiny circulatory system flowing like roughly knotted dreamcatcher-string on the folds of her flesh.

"I would like, if I may," posits the image on the screen, and an invisible audience packing the theater with the warmth and moisture of their breath roars back, "You may not!"








Lights, light and dark and bright bright color everywhere -  aubergine with the contrast cranked up to fifty on your old worn-out desktop monitor; a tint of cerulean only found in nature when the last beam of sunset trickles down to meet the saturated blue waters two-thirds of the way down the Mariana Trench; the hue that a cell of a deciduous tree leaf might see the world in, gradating shades of its home. The strobe lights wash out the faces and the hands and the eyes of the people on the dance floor, but it cannot fade the colors of their clothes, shining brightly and beaconing through the dry-ice fog that floats down in lazy spirals from the vents, too slow even for the macro-beat of the club mix thudding through the speakers. This is what his last view of the world is like, until over him the crowd closes in again and all he sees is shoes and then the sparkings of color splashed onto the black canvas of his eyelids, strangely muted after the wild and varied plumage of the crowd that grinds out his death sentence beneath their drug-addled heels, rubber raver shoes and five-inch fetish stilettos.

Over the speakers, the beat thuds on, and above it an Algerian or Egyptian or Arabian singer warbles and wails, and the crowd dances on, a writhing mass of humanity determined to forget everything they've ever known.








Once upon a time, there was a girl, and she never believed she could be a princess. And in fairytales, what you believe is often what is. Such it was in this one – the girl was not a princess. To be fair, though, there weren't many princesses left to grace the world with their presence – not true ones, anyway. There were probably one or two in Europe or something, but they were the type to sully the name with their increasingly stupid and always incredibly public exploits.

She never wanted to be a princess, either, she just wanted to live her life quietly and happily. She did not want her chance at adventure, her chance at love, she simply wanted to live. But being as the universe has a cruel sense of humor, it circumvented all of her wishes.

She was sixteen when she moved out of her house, saying she was going to seek her fortune in a note she left for her poor mother to find, and she was thirty-seven when she came back, a sweet-faced eighteen-year-old girl in tow.

"But surely you didn't have a daughter – and raise her to adulthood, no less – without coming and finding me once!" her mother asked, amazed at the sudden appearance of her long-lost daughter and more than a little hurt.

No, she explained, she didn't. But she found her fortune when it was two years old, and she had to be patient enough to wait. And she was in love, mother, wasn't it wonderful? And though her mother agreed, a sickly light shone through her eyes and something in her face closed off.

When they found the both of them just before the wedding, curled together like foetuses in the womb, the note read, "The universe is watching, and we are tired of being judged."





<sub>No one in hell is really dead, and most everyone alive isn't really living.

The universe enjoys irony.</sub>