I came downtown fully intending to get drunk and bold enough to finally ask the bartender out. The Bag Man got in the way of the patio entrance to the Plucker.
His unfortunate name was my invention, an unimaginative title based on the observation of the plastic bags tied in knots around the bottom of his filthy pants, devices to keep the rodents from biting his legs.
Normally, I didn’t notice him but my resolve about the bartender was weak and in danger of disintegrating, especially in the face of any minor deterrent, which I would likely use as an excuse to not follow through.
“Fuck,” I swore, looking suddenly into sad, distant eyes. Poverty destroys the dignity of a person but can’t invade the remaining humanity locked in one’s gaze. Instantly, I regretted swearing at him. Nevertheless, I proceeded into the darkened bar and flinched at the sight of Emily, reaching above the bar with her long legs and short kilt. Our eyes met, and she knew I was checking her out.
“Hey stranger,” she said because she didn’t and doesn’t know my actual name. I haven’t had the courage to offer it during our miniscule conversation, little more than a formulaic dialogue.
“The usual?” she asked, red lips parting to reveal the slightly crooked tooth I adore.
“Yes, please.” I always reply quietly with a nod. I have no idea if she even hears my voice because the music in the bar is so loud. A pint arrived anyway and I drank deeply, greedily; I needed to be less me if this was going to happen.
It could totally happen. I lie to myself unconvincingly because I’m obviously not drunk enough. More alcohol arrives with the promise of an inebriated liberation from fear.
Attendant grogginess and slurring is the price. I called out for Emily. She looked surprised I knew her name. Another pint appeared but she didn’t deliver it. The owner, Jeff or something, suddenly took over service. Emily had shifted to the other end of the bar.
“You moved her,” I accused Jeff Something.
“Eh? What’s that?” He had so many customers. No time for the concerns of a coming of age barfly. Loud music was too loud. I needed to regroup.
I got off the stool. One isn’t drunk until they stand up. I wobbled and took some deep breaths of stuffy Plucker air before making my way through the crush of Thursday night patrons.
University students and army reservists from the local armoury mingled and laughed and flirted. Their lives were ahead, and they were unaware, or perhaps disgusted by the thirty-year-old example of a life determined to be wasted. I didn’t know how to tell them or anyone I couldn’t do better. I was once like them, and now I only wanted someone to give me permission to cry.
The air outside was cool for mid September, and already full of the sweet, atrophied scent of fallen leaves. There were piles in the gutter where I put my feet.
When I die, my soul will sit on a curb to study the sky forever. If I look up for long enough, I become hopeful. And a little less inebriated.
With my wavering resolve recovering under a banner of stars, I took a deep breath and got to my feet, still too drunk to be regarded as any kind of suitor. Just as I contemplated sitting down again, the Bag Man pinched my elbow.
“What the fuck?”
He’d come out of nowhere.
“What do you want? Fuck off.”
Sad eyes invited self-reflection.
“Look, sorry, I’m not having the best night. Do you need some money or something?” I reached into my coat pocket, knowing full well it was empty. Who carries cash anymore?
From a plastic bag not tied to prevent rodents entering his pants, he presented, of all things, a DVD disc. It was plain, kind of beat up, and didn’t come in a case. I hadn’t watched a DVD in years, though I still had my parents’ VHS/DVD combo player. It was only missing the stop button, which their cat had chewed off.
The Bag Man gently pushed it in my direction. That’s when I saw the name and year in faded sharpie: Mike ‘96.
“No thank you,” I said.
He lowered the hand holding the DVD and nodded as his gaze became distant and depressed. Here was a man with nothing.
“Okay, okay,” I relented. “I’ll take it. Thank you.”
It’s like the sun rose in his heart. I took the DVD, fully intending to bin it the second I went inside.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice gravelly and the words slow, the syllables stilted off a lazy tongue.
“I don’t actually have any money,” I admitted.
But he was already going. He walked down Harper Street and disappeared down the corridor leading to the bus station. I watched because I was procrastinating. Could I actually ask Emily out?
Jeff Something had moved her because I was becoming a problem. I didn’t want to be that guy. But I also didn’t want to be the guy limping home, wishing he wasn’t such a loser.
I’d take it slow. That’s what I’d do. I went back in and ordered water. Jeff Something saw the DVD I’d forgotten about. I’d stuck my thumb and index through the hole and turned it into a fidget toy.
“He finally found someone willing to take it,” he said, placing the water on a coaster.
I flinched because he was too close to my face; I could smell whisky on his breath. Jeff leaned back like he realized our proximity was weird. He nodded and smiled apologetically.
“He’s been trying to give that to someone for years.” Stupid loud music and now, too many voices, noises crawling over noises. Suddenly, the water seemed dumb.
“Vodka,” I yelled. Jeff brought it over and wouldn’t let me tab it. He handed back the credit card I’d given to Emily, who was now working the floor to deliver drinks to patrons. I avoided staring at her but she caught my glance once and it was awkward.
How could I ask her out? I didn’t want to be with me. Why would she? Or anyone?
Defeated once more, I thought of slinking out the door again. Where should I drink tomorrow? Obviously, I couldn’t show my face in the Plucker anymore. Not that anyone would notice.
“Mike ‘96,” Jeff said loudly, right into my ear. He smiled when I looked at him, smug, like he knew I was a nobody. “Are you going to watch it?”
I looked at the DVD. “Hadn’t planned on it.”
“What?”
Too. Loud. “No!”
He laughed. “I’d be scared too.”
“I’m not scared.”
He shook his head. “What?” But then he was off again, pouring drinks. Emily reached over my shoulder to receive and deliver some. I tried not to look. The song ended and there was a momentary quiet. Another regular I sort of recognized walked in.
“Hey stranger,” she said to him. “The usual?”
He sat down on the stool next to mine. I couldn’t help noticing his hands were battered, wrinkled, and with bluish green veins revealed by thinning skin. He was old. He was my future, and he was old, and still just a “stranger” to those around him.
I had to go. It was too close to sitting beside a mirror and hating the reflection.
The walk home was particularly shameful because not only did I feel awful, the landmarks of poverty leading to my one bedroom apartment were all in full evidence tonight. The homeless, the druggies, the overflowing garbage cans, and new, desperate graffiti from the youth trapped here. What is it for? Written in red across a dumpster in the driveway of a condemned house.
What is it for? Hell if I knew.
By the time I found my mostly empty fridge in my one bedroom, I was practically enraged. I went for an opened bottle of the worst red wine in existence, and got even angrier when I couldn’t remove the screw-top because of Mike ‘96 on my finger. I’d been wearing the stupid DVD the whole way home.
With the rancid wine and a bag of chips, I crumpled into the couch. I finally put the DVD on the coffee table and had a drink from the bottle. Godawful stuff. I put it down and reached into the chips; unfortunately, they reached back. I dropped the bag and could see creepy crawlies inside.
“God damn it.”
No booze. No chips. Only Mike ‘96.
I don’t know why it suddenly became so urgent to find the combo player, and why I had to watch the DVD. It felt like defiance to do so. Maybe that’s why? I don’t know. Angry, drunk people do angry, drunk things.
I got it hooked up and playing sometime on the wrong side of midnight.
Here’s my best attempt to describe what’s on it:
A black screen presents the title of the film in plain text: Mike ‘96
Then the picture fades to a cemetery, one I recognized as being close to the high-school I attended. The filmmaker starts to walk slowly, trying to hold the camera steady without success. They swing the view back and forth in a nauseating attempt to capture the undulating fields of gravestones.
There’s laughter in the distance. It sounds like kids screwing around. The filmmaker is attracted by the noise and goes over to see three teens at the end of a row of already kicked over markers, most of which are old and worn smooth by time.
There are soldiers from the war of 1812 buried there, and ordinary people from as late as the 2000s too. I know because my history teacher made us go there and a kid freaked out because she saw her own name on one of the tombstones. That was in grade ten.
“You shouldn’t do that,” the filmmaker, a young woman by her voice, says to the boys. They turn on her so quickly. There’s no way to see it coming. She drops the camera after the first blow; the shot is sideways and there he is, the namesake of the film: Michael Pierce. Died in 1996.
His marker looks new, shiny, and it’s reflective enough to project a shadow play of the violence. Kicks and stomps and punches. The boys howl and grunt like animals. There’s no protest or defense put up by the still form of the woman. She’s unconscious or dead and they continue for minutes before two of them seem to lift her body and toss it out of the vague reflection.
At that point, I was certain I just watched a snuff film. One of the boy’s sneakers steps in front of the lens.
“We should go,” he says hoarsely.
“One more,” another insists.
The camera is picked up then and pointed at the teen who just spoke. He can’t be older than fifteen. His arms appear dipped in blood and he’s catching his breath.
“Don’t point that at me, dummy,” he says before striding to his companion and taking the camera. The device is returned to the grass but still not turned off. This time the view is of an older gravestone, half sunk into the ground and small: IN MEMORY OF BABY…The infant’s name has been swallowed by the soil.
The heel of a Doc Martin briefly enters the picture, cracking the tiny grave marker. A second kick snaps the rock from the base. All three boys chuckle but it’s forced, nervous.
“Come on man, she’s waking up,” urges the one I suspect had wanted them to leave before.
“Not yet,” says the Doc Martens kid. His belt jingles and his zipper unzips. Dark, yellow piss flows over the remnants of Baby’s grave. More laughter but only from the urinator. The demeaning ceremony of vandalism ends and the kids run off, leaving the camera.
Moments go by and, as I watched, I wondered what could possibly come next, and why the Bag Man had this and wanted to give it away so badly.
Since the combo player had no remote, I got up to eject the DVD. That was the only way to stop it from playing because, as i mentioned, my parents’ cat had chewed off the stop button.
But the view moves suddenly as the camera is picked up by the filmmaker. She directs the lens to her broken and bloodied face, and then the screen pauses. I thought it was the player but I think she edited the movie to end like this.
“Do not forgive them,” a voice says, and it can’t be hers. It hardly sounds human at all. “They know what they are doing.” It’s hard to describe; the closest imitation would be text reading software sped up and deepened at the same time.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, finally getting the paused image off my TV and the DVD back on my index finger. I turned around and there I was on the couch.
“W-what the h-hell?”
I looked around the apartment. I looked at my hands, and felt my face. It had to be a hallucination, a dream. I couldn’t be watching myself watching myself.
The person on the couch exhaled sharply and then a gurgle came from the back of his throat. Drool formed in the corners of his mouth and started dripping down his chin.
“You’re not dead,” said a voice behind me. I spun around and an old man was standing next to the TV. “I am.” He smiled and it might have been the worst facial expression I’ve ever witnessed because it blurred his features and made his black eyes vibrate.
“Who the fuck are you?” I backed away, and put the couch, and me or my body, between us.
“I used to live here,” he said. “Now I’m just… here.” Another smile disrupted his features, pieces of his face split apart, broken seams full of light.
“Stop doing that,” I told him.
“Sorry. I can’t help it. I don’t know how.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I died. I guess this is after that. And I’m not always here. I try to be, but sometimes I’m somewhere else. I can be with my wife once in a while. When she thinks about me, I get to go to her. One time she missed me very much and I used an old telephone someone had thrown into the garbage to call her. She kept asking who it was, and no matter how much I screamed that it was me, she only heard static. Scared her badly, so I don’t do that anymore.”
“Shut up. What’s going on?” I wasn’t asking him anymore. I leaned against the couch and my fingertip brushed the edge of a hair on the body - me - still on the couch in a catatonic state. I could feel the touch on the back of my head.
“I told you,” the old man said, “you’re not dead. But I don’t think you can live like this either. Plus-“ The temperature in the room dropped to nothing almost as fast as the light fled from the room. The old man sank into the floor. “Uh-oh,” he whispered. “It’s one of them. This makes more sense now. You should run.” He was nearly gone, neck dipping beneath the cheap linoleum.
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Don’t let it catch you,” he breathed. “If it catches you, you’re really done for.”
“I don’t even know-“
But he was gone and I was left to face a figure in the darkness, wreathed in a halo of orange light, a slow moving flame revealing the outline of an animalistic skull. It was there for me. Not my body but whatever thing I had become after watching that DVD.
“What do you want?” I stupidly asked, knowing full well the answer I just mentioned. Its empty skull sockets weren’t empty at all. Within them dwelled a spirit of evil, something humans know instinctively to fear and avoid.
I ran for the door but my fingers only rattled the knob. The figure didn’t move. I don’t know if they can ever really occupy a physical space. But it set its will upon me and that is the same as if claws were sunk into my neck. A paralysis spread through me and movement became difficult. The beginning of something horrific was about to commence in a world without time but eternal sequences nonetheless.
My fingers continued to rattle the knob. Then a fist pounded on the other side of the door.
“Everything okay in there?” It was the landlord. He lived next to me. “Look, I’m going to call the police, okay?” He swore and his keys rattled as he searched for the one that would open my door. The second his hand clasped the knob, my fingers slipped off. The way opened and I think he saw me.
He looked confused and scared. “Sorry bud, I saw your handle jiggling. You okay?”
I couldn’t answer because I suddenly couldn’t remember how to form words. The trapped feeling relented and I moved into the hallway and kept walking.
“Where are you-“ The landlord gasped. “What the hell?!” I looked back and he was looking into the apartment and back out into the hallway. He saw my body on the couch. He couldn’t see me anymore.
Another lady was leaving the building for her nightshift. I slipped through the slow-close exit and drifted along the streets in a daze.
A lit up ambulance raced by and stopped at my building. They were there to pick up the body I left behind. The old man said I wasn’t dead. Sure felt like I must be though.
The streets were empty. I didn’t feel tired or hungry or anything. If not for the persistent feeling of being watched, I’d said it was the best I’d felt in years. Gone was the impact of poor, alcoholic sleep. In its place, the numbness all that drinking had tried to achieve had finally been realized.
I followed a familiar path, the one I’d walked the most in life, straight to the Plucker, closed up tight and locked and dark. I looked through a window and recoiled from the inky shapes moving like tendrils of smoke within. I didn’t get the feeling they were the same as the evil thing with the twisted skull slowly pursuing me, but neither were they friendly.
I moved on again, and saw the corner leading to the bus station. The Bag Man had beelined there after cursing me with the DVD. I couldn’t move the spinning doorway. I could touch it, feel the glass, but had no strength to start the rotation. Nobody seemed to be inside and nothing too. I waited.
In the silver edge of pre-dawn, he came, the Bag Man without his bags or ragged clothes. He looked refreshed and clean. His hands pushed through the spinning door and I leapt into the compartment with him before it shifted. When he stepped into the station promenade, he stared for a moment at the ticket wickets on the far wall and the big clock above.
He couldn’t see me. Yet, he hesitated, scanning the floors and ramps leading to the pick-up spots outside. Finally, he exhaled and went to the tiny variety store on the left. He unlocked and pulled the metal cage, and flicked on the lights. Then he began to set up, and sweep, and get things ready for the day. I think I can be forgiven for not immediately understanding that he worked there.
Eventually, he sat on a stool behind the plastic counter and tried to read a newspaper. He couldn’t focus, however, and carefully set it down.
“I know you’re there,” he said. “Who could have guessed you had a DVD player and would watch it? If you’d thrown it away, this wouldn’t have happened. I think it’d be fine if it stayed buried in a landfill, especially if you’d broken it in half or something. See, they’re sort of like scorpions - the evil attached to that movie is one of them - the bigger and scarier they look, the less fatal the venom. With scorpions, it’s the little ones you should really worry about.”
I couldn’t say his words were lessening my confusion.
“You can touch things,” he said. “But you’ll only be able to pick up what’s been discarded.” The old man at my apartment had said something about a phone in the garbage.
Bag Man ripped a page from his newspaper, crumpled it up, and then carefully set it on the edge of the waste bin. “Go ahead. Poke it in. Then I’ll be able to see you maybe.”
I did as he said and saw the recognition of my presence in his eyes. Even though he’d been expecting it, he still looked scared. He touched a crucifix tattooed beneath his collar.
He pointed to the DVD on my finger. “You have to give it to someone else.” I presented Mike ‘96 back to him, since he’d been the one to start this nightmare. “No, sorry,” he said. “I won’t take it again. You’ll have to find someone else. Then, if you’re still alive?”
It was a question. I found it difficult to nod.
“Then you’ll be able to go back. I woke up in the hospital after three years. They said I was in a coma. No point in trying to convince them otherwise. They’ll just think you’re crazy. You got any family?”
Answering seemed impossible as I faded from his vision. He couldn’t see me anymore.
“That’s okay, just listen. You can live a long time in the hospital. They’ll take care of you. But if you have family, they’ll be given the option to pull the plug and donate your organs. I don’t have any family, so the doctor couldn’t legally do it even though I wasn’t showing brain activity. Might be the one time I was glad I got no family.”
I thought of the distant relationship between myself and my parents. The combo player had been the last Christmas gift I’d received from them, two years ago. I didn’t go to dinners or birthdays because we had nothing to talk about. I’d gone past the days of trying to impress them with accomplishments and they’d stopped pretending to care.
They would pull the plug.
It’d taken Bag Man three years to find someone dumb enough to accept Mike ‘96. I started to panic. How much time did I have? What would happen if I died? Somehow, I knew the answer, and Bag Man confirmed it as if reading my thoughts.
“The evil one is with your body now. It’s waiting for you to die. I saw it with my body when I went back. The good news was that it couldn’t stop me because I didn’t have the DVD. Don’t let it catch you otherwise though. If it finds you… well, I don’t exactly know, but… don’t let it find you.”
I went to the plastic counter and tried to put Mike ‘96 in his hand. He didn’t see me and I couldn’t make physical contact. It was like when you try to put the same sides of magnets together and the charges push each other away.
“One more thing,” he said. “Part of the reason it took so long to figure this out was I didn’t know I had to give it away. Also, I didn’t know I could only use stuff people threw out. Last, I think, the more stuff you have, the easier it is for someone to notice you.”
The bags he’d tied on his limbs weren’t for rats. He needed to stand out. I could do that. I’d seen the homeless with their shopping cart piles. Were they dead? Or whatever this was? Disembodied souls trying to get noticed by the living?
People - the living - began to pour into the promenade for the morning rush. Their presence pushed mine away. The magnet thing was happening again. I struggled to move along the walls until I could make my escape with someone leaving at the same time.
Outside, staring directly at me, was an ordinary looking man with gray facial hair and a long black coat. His arm unfolded and he beckoned me over. I almost went.
They’re like scorpions, the Bag Man had said. Smaller, less impressive meant more potent venom.
I ran to the next corner. When I looked back, the thing was gone. My thoughts raced. Panicked, I dove into the first dumpster I saw, behind the donut shop. Food scraps and sodden paper bags were plentiful. But it stank badly.
I thought of getting noticed. I thought of rubbing the garbage all over me, and how it didn’t make sense to have a body to smear refuse upon while my actual body was somewhere else.
Before I really committed to the donut trash, I studied my hands. They weren’t real. Or, somehow, they were more real because they were the idea of my hands without which my actual hands could not exist. I laughed at my hands then because surely, I had crossed the threshold of madness.
A worker carrying a trash bag found me and looked surprised. Not as surprised as I was that she could see me. It didn’t last because I disappeared. Then she dropped the trash and ran.
Inside the plastic bag was more palatable garbage, a bunch of unused paper bags. I punched through the bottoms of several and moved them up along my arms until I had two sleeves.
Next, I wandered into the street and giggled wildly as people moved to avoid me. They wouldn’t look my way but they must have at least partly seen something to step around.
I tried to give the DVD to anyone passing outside a bank but no one would stop. Adding more bags drew more looks and that’s all. I needed someone to stop.
People don’t often stop during the workday. They stopped at night, and where did they stop? Why, a bar like the Plucker. The Bag Man had chosen his location wisely. Drunk people do drunk things like take a DVD from a homeless person. Alcohol moved compassion and indifference into action. Charity increased, and so did violence. I had to be careful.
The ordinary man made another appearance by the bank and a few others, those like me, scampered away. I ran again too.
I went to the Plucker and hid under a small hedge by a law office across the street. The bar opened for lunch. Jeff Something showed up first, and I thought about trying to give it to him and how satisfying it would be if he were in this predicament. I hated him for his confidence and proximity to Emily.
If I went during the day, however, the patrons weren’t likely to be drunk and stupid enough to take the DVD. I’d be out in the open and one of those things might come. The ordinary man seemed content to only make its presence known for now. That might not be the case next time. Plus, the skull head one, according to Bag Man, might come hunting too. I needed to be patient and strike at peak inebriation.
Sometime around 10 PM, I came out from the hedge and took up Bag Man’s former post by the patio entrance to the bar. Many paid me zero mind as they came and went. I gestured wildly for attention without success. The paperbag sleeves weren’t enough.
Something crazier was required. It had to be noticeable but not repulsive. A disgusting person got noticed in order to be dodged. I found twigs and branches beneath a tree and made a crown. As I placed it onto my head, I felt a strange kind of pride; I hadn’t actually made anything interesting or good for a very long time.
I crouched against the wall and a few coins were dropped into my lap. My fear and panic and confusion began to disappear as I considered the life I apparently wanted to get back to. I’d more interactions with people in the last few hours than I had in months.
Just as I felt my desire to give away the DVD falter, the ordinary man and twisted skull head appeared across the street, waiting at the edges of a lone street light’s illumination.
You could come with me, the old man suggested, words spoken without a mouth, a tongue, a body.
Forgive me, lord, the skull said with a voice like distant thunder, he is mine, by rights. He viewed my totem and heard its message.
The presence of the ordinary man grew and made the air heavy, difficult to breathe.
Nothing belongs to the worms, said the ordinary man. The willing may go where they choose, and he is no one’s with a tether still to the corporeal. I think I will have him because he is already free of the shell and I would like to have another body to stretch and pain. Yes, I do think it will be so.
The skull head one bowed till its chin touched the curb. No other being seemed to be on the street or else the darkness following these creatures simply blotted out the light of anything remotely good and living.
Below, the ground began to shift and I started to descend by the will of the ordinary man. He would take my body and this spirit and make each suffer to suit his desire. I keep writing “he” but be assured they are an “it”, an entity residing in mystery, thriving in the dark.
No, I don’t want to. I still couldn’t talk. Nevertheless, they heard my plea and the futility of it gave them cause for amusement. Our suffering gives them joy, and I don’t know why.
I was scared. My ankles were already swallowed by the depths.
And then…
“Hey stranger,” she said. Emily stood with her hand in her purse, searching for money. I held the DVD out just as she found a five to give to me. The bill slipped from my fingers because I couldn’t hold it. She took Mike ‘96 with her other hand.
“Uh, thank you.” She went inside.
“Thank you,” I could finally say. The air felt lighter, free of them. I stood above the concrete, and they were both gone. I didn’t hang around to see if they’d be back. The hospital isn’t far from the bus station. That’s why the Bag Man had gone that way after our exchange.
When I finally found my room and my body, it was the following morning, and my parents were there with a doctor and a nurse. My mother cried. My father stared coldly at my passive face and finally sneered, unable to hide his true feelings. The doctor removed a tube from my arm. They were already in the process of ending my life. It’d been slightly longer than a day. It made me sad.
The skull head occupied the corner of the ceiling - its skull sat amidst swirling, black smoke.
“What will happen,” I asked, “if I go with you?”
Unparalleled delight, it lied, badly.
I sighed and entered my body. I gasped and drew in a huge breath. The doctor paled visibly and the nurse’s mouth fell open. Mom fainted and my dad looked disappointed. I’d failed him again.
Despite the urging of the doctor, I got out of the bed and left, heading straight to my apartment. I knew what I had to do. Like the Bag Man, I hoped the DVD lacked a player this time.
I went to the bar for lunch and spoke with Jeff Something. His real name wasn’t Jeff. It’s Joseph, and the DVD in question had been forgotten by Emily in the office the previous night.
“Good,” I told him. “Smash it.”
“Why?”
“Just… trust me.”
“Is it something illegal? Is it yours? You got it from the homeless guy, right?”
“Look,” I said, “I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it.” I looked at the generic bank machine by the basement stairs and wondered if I could recall my PIN.
“I think you’d better leave,” Joseph said.
“No,” I said, “you don’t understand.”
He moved around the bar, and I held my palms up in surrender.
“I’ll go but don’t watch the DVD, okay? Just break it and throw it away.” He crossed his arms and stared until I went.
Despite the aggression from Joe, I returned to the Plucker, and started going more and more when Emily disappeared. He thinks I had something to do with it. I don’t know if her body is in the hospital because that information is obviously kept back from non-family. The DVD isn’t at the bar.
I go back whenever I can and just hang around, trying to see, really see, the people that could be there, struggling to be seen.
And I encourage you to do the same. That person in a tinfoil hat, wearing too many coats, or seagull feathers in their hair might have a gift for you.
Take it. It validates their humanity. But don’t use whatever it is. It isn’t safe.
I wrote my story with the help of AP Cleriot after seeing their call for experiences in Bridal Veil Lake. I understand another such story is already in this forum, and a link to the overall archive related to the investigation can be found here
AP has posted this story but both of us are available to answer any questions you have.
And I totally understand if you think I’m insane. Just, please, can you pretend I’m not?
And that I matter? That everyone matters. I think it may be our only hope.