2623 Fiction

2623 Fiction

         The strength of Brian was not his fearlessness.  Still, Brian had no fear.  The fights he chose to enter were selected to display the greatness of his power. 
         I love stories of knights in shinning armor.  Ladies in distress make for great emotional hooks.  Complicated storylines, however, where the protagonist and antagonist are not white and black, that makes for more realistic storylines.  Realism gets personal: life happens. 
         When Aeria entered the man’s life, Brian didn’t figure she would turn his life into a whirlwind.  In fact, Brian had seen dozens of women, many of whom were more attractive.  Attractiveness, successfulness, and even spiritually, were qualities she lacked.  Who the fuck cares about attractiveness when you are drunk?  Success isn’t measured monetarily.  Not for Brian in any case.  He was old fashioned anyway, preferring to buy the drinks never allowing the woman to pay.  Aeria had other features. 
          “Tell me babe, if you are feeling me, we should hit the road.  My place is in the city, not far.”  Brian was begging for it. 
         “Ha!”  Aeria gave him the look that any barfly knows to mean, ‘I will race you to the door.’ 
         When they woke up that next morning, a Sunday, the hangovers and awkwardness, surprisingly, never happened.  Something else happened.  That morning, on that particular morning, life was changed. 
         Aeria began by eating her breakfast while Brian watched her pretending to read the Appleton Post Crescent.  Their eyes met again and one thing lead to another again, and then in the shower, again. 
         Many stories take a love interest and then toy with the reader’s mind until the reader becomes unsure if the love will ever develop, and then, as if by necessity, the pair falls in love and as fiction ends; they live happily ever after.
         Rapture, that is what it is called, when believers practicing the teaching of Jesus Christ disappear from this world.  These fortunate are beamed or lifted or by any other means sent on up into Heaven.  So, when Brian and Aeria were busy fucking it comes to nobody’s surprise that they survived.  Survival is a bitch.  The word implies living but not thriving.  Brian and Aeria fit the description. 
         Brian had a fight scheduled that night.  The fight that Brian had lined up never happened: a new fight came to him. 
         As the one-night-stand happened, 60 million members of Earth vanished.  The rapture happened!  Funny thing about rapture is that the remaining population is under the direct control of Lucifer.  Controlled as victims of the lord of the underworld.  A peculiar point is that the memories of the remaining survivors become adjusted.  Each individual’s life memories are twisted so that the people raptured would never be remembered on Earth.  For seven years Lucifer has Earth to play games, twist, and to manipulate literally making Earth Hell.  After which, God will come to judge everyone and everyone will be held accountable. 
         Seven years of Hell, all the while Brian had no idea when the timer began?  Aeria’s eyes turned blue and twinkled.  Brian worked, he was, in fact, a very hard worker and a great employee.  His patrons would attest to that.  Brian went to low-end digs and played banjo and plucked for a bluegrass band.  Brian’s hobbies were not on Aeria’s mind.  As the days passed and the couple became more serous, Brian felt something strange: in his gut Brian knew his life was different.  Aeria knew more. 
         The lightning began in Brian’s head almost immediately.  A whirlwind, like synapse misfiring, over and over again.  Lucifer knows that physical pain does not hurt the most.  He knows that even severe mental anguish is not the ultimate form of torment.  Earning the soul of a person only takes one thing.  Lucifer pushed slowly.  He nudged and whispered.  Slow coercion and confusion, even psychosis, were all techniques used by the master of deception. 
The ‘one thing’ for every individual is different.  Some hold an affinity for pornography, some for murder.  For most, Brian included, the optimal fall from grace came from Pride, Vanity, and Promiscuity.  The premise is simple: Jesus saves.  The world corrupts.  All Lucifer needs to do is convince individual people that he or she is in control of his or her own life.  That is it.  If Brian believes that his future is not under the direction of God, then his life is in fact not under God’s protection. 
When Brian was a boy he knew the truth of God’s will.  As he aged, he, step-by-step, and lie-by-lie, drifted away from that belief, and from his necessary repentance.  The world does not burn in one day and Brian’s world did not burn overnight.  True, he met the devil, and it is also true she entered his life with a one-night-stand.  Lucifer is a patient master of lies who never sleeps. 
When Aeria suggested he listen to a new band at the local bar, Brian agreed.  Before the show, Brian and Aeria got high.  They loved mixing it up: smoke a little grass and maybe have a drink or two.  If Brian has no family, who is going to get hurt? 
At the bar the two drank their fill.  Brian loved the spins he got when mixing.  The band did not even show but Brian didn’t care.  As it turns out, Aeria disappeared.  Sometime in the night she just was not there.  This disturbed Brian and the strangers at the bar were staring and laughing at him.  Brian was confused by this attention, but disregarded it as paranoia, or hallucination from drugs.  If it was a hallucination then it couldn’t be real.  Oh, but it was all real. 
         The two went out to party every weekend.  The weekends at the Steak Knife, where Reggae ruled, became house parties and mushrooms.  Brian ate a peanut butter mushroom sandwich and the world turned.  Aeria appeared and then the light came in.  The light was strong, stronger than the rays that comprised it.  When Brian saw it he coward.  The people, the newspapers, his friends and all his enemies laughed.  At first Brian didn’t understand anything, soon after he started guessing.  His projections personified itself into such absurdities as: painting clouds into the sky, throwing away full paint tubes, as sacrificial donations, and wind chasing: literal wind chasing.  Brian flew through that city drunk on his manic hallucinations.  Aeria smirked in her mind.  Then when all sanity of thought was lost to Brian, she even smirked at him. 
         Aeria loved Brian’s newly found inward sanity.  Insane is a strong word, the right word, but a strong word.  Brian figured that he smoked and drank himself into the problem.  Therefore, Works were the answer to his problems, and so Brian ran on.  Brian ran in every direction hoping to find up.  It is hard to fly when you don’t have wings. 
         Brian fought against his mind, a victim of his heart and a victim of his mind.  People talk about the seven circles of Hell, or consider the burning flames.  I am not saying this is all wrong, but Hell is a place where Brian sees and feels and hears everyone against him.  Brian believed that he may die and go to Hell every moment of every day for seven years.  To put it better, Brian believed he would die every moment of every day for seven years.  It did not matter to him that this anticipation was Hell itself.  Or maybe that idea never crossed his mind.  It would be hard for Brian to concentrate long enough to have formed that hypothesis.  Consider enjoying a life that is filled with a mere moment of Hell, and then consider this moment happening over and over ever changing but always torment. 
         At some point Brian’s mind broke.  Nevertheless, Aeria had slithered her way into Brian: Brian and Aeria were one.  The concrete jungle became a playground.  Even Hell has a moment of bliss.  Actually it has anticipation that a moment will exists, but then it never comes.  A moment in which the persecuted can pursue divinity.  It has a shining glimmer, and this is fuel for Brian’s hope, the shining glimmer exists as a beacon and is the only sunny place out of pure disaster.  Brian felt this years later.  Aeria knew she controlled this and every other part of the miserable Hell he endured.  This was Aeria’s home.  This was Hell. 
          Aeria came from royalty.  She was a favorite among the famous.  Her father was king of all creation.  She was perfection.  Moments turned into days and days into millennia.  She loved.  She lived.  She never died.  At some juncture in all the perfection passive feelings brewed.  These feeling were forged not of perfection yet Aeria looked where few did.  Aeria had senses that mere humans cannot pretend to even fabricate.  Her feelings became notions, and an idea had formulated a thought. 
         Then came the moment: the King formed a ball of clay.  The King made man.  The King commanded all to bow to the human made of clay.  Aeria was, as any sane angel would be, enraged.  Why should she bow to some momentary creation that her King God the Father made? She knew man would fall away again to ash. 
         Here comes Brian from that clay.  The decade is irrelevant.  The day and week are just as irrelevant as the millennium.  Aeria became He, and He was cursed into a serpent.  He was none other than Lucifer. 
Seven years began when the young man was twenty-two years of age.  At twenty-nine the reign of terror was over.  All at once, Brian became a believer in higher powers.  His belief was a strong thing.  Humans do not comprehend the gravity of belief.  Even those Jesus freaks and Muslim heretics do not connect to the power.  Wiccans have a closer conception of power.  The irony then is that Wiccan power lasts few moments and has consequences that last eternally. 
         Brian decided to move out of his father’s home when he was eleven.  He followed through just shy of seventeen.  His full figure matched well to the ignoble lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. 
         Throughout his life, including Aeria, girls never cared for him.  This bothered Brian greatly.  He masked the inner fury with games.  Brian lived in a world wrought with drugs, but his first love was comic books.  ‘Dork’ would describe the child fully.  When bullied on the schoolyard in his elementary grades, Brian fell to the ground and curled up in a ball then wailed. 
         How that vision came to be the high metabolism beast of present day Brian is bewildering.  Perhaps the scars of his past, and never taking a stand on his own haunted the man.  Perhaps Brian became a puppet for Aeria.  Perhaps all this happens for a reason.  Or, maybe, his life was the trial and trail which every soul travels.  Life is pain, death is Hell, and enlightenment is fleeting. 
         The Others began creeping around, shadows in the light.  In an attempt to describe a day in the life of Brian, and the Hell that he was in, he will speak through me.  “I began the day 12AM still awake, of course, and painting with oils.  Before the clock strikes 12:01 I had an urge to change whatever song is playing, on the radio that I have connected with headphones. 
The radio is a small thing I stole at the sweet age of nine and it had an Eddie Bower logo.  The neat part was that it was really very tiny.  As small as an iPod, but long before such things existed.  The urge came to change the station, and I was in no position to fight off any urge.  At 12:01 I am bothered and excited at the same time.  At 12:02AM that bothering comes through the door; my roommate Nick walks through the door that I would have locked, once upon a time, when I worried about people catching me smoking marijuana.  I no longer believed that people would, nor were capable of catching me doing anything that society deemed as ‘wrong.’ 
I stopped smoking pot nearly two months prior, but still caught a buzz every time I painted.  A strange coincidence, it was, that I dismissed away.  Needless to say I painted a lot.  My roommate never once gave me shit about the lights always on as he slept.  I slept less and less.  (I suppose this should come as no surprise because the Prince of Darkness is the one who never sleeps.)  Furthermore, my mind created all the people I was acquainted to, as more projections of my subconscious than actual humans, with actual souls.  12:02 the fear that Nick is actually a saint who has authority to judge my sinful life takes root and for the next two hours I am filled with fear that I will be damned.  12:03 a glance from Nick, after thinking that a picture I have of four women which I hung on the wall were sexually attractive, collides with the song that is now playing, and at 12:04 I hated myself.  Afraid, I was always and forever afraid.  Fear is an interesting concept.  Alas, I must leave that for another day. 
For the night, I climb into my bed and lied there.  The time was 1:11, I looked at the clock, the time was 2:22, this time I woke up, the time was 3:33 AM.  After many nights of this, the fear gets old.  The fear of numbers can be aloud to get old, other fears, most fears, are enhanced.  I hear an alarm clock and wait as the crushing jackhammer sound outside finishes.  The sound doesn’t stop so I roll over.  8:08 AM, ‘finally something different’ I muttered to myself because my roommate has vanished. 
I showered.  One of the few points of fleeting solace I find was in keeping my outward appearance in check, thus allowing Vanity to be who I was.  Fast-forward and the time was about ten o’clock; I am walking to class when I look up to see something unbelievable and supernatural.  Undeniably!  The field that separates one building from another is filled with smiling and sporty people.  They all were stretching in superhuman speed.  Fifty or so people stretching at superhuman speed.  I was knocked right out of the face of vanity into fear at this realization: an entire field of people could not be real people, instead they must have been projections or hallucinations.  This realization flooded my mind.  At this point any sane person would recognize the obvious and check himself or herself into the nearest mental hospital, or mosque, or church.  Then again, no sane person would need to.  Survival went on, and on, and on.  Then my day ends.” 

         “End” is an overused word.  After movies people used to put “The End.”  After some cartoons, “The End” was frequently injected.  Still, an end is usually not a nice and tighty finish of any real concept.  When a party “ends” does that mean that the fun is over?  Does it mean that life’s fervor is finished?  The point has been made that life ends when relationships stop, or that life ends when a family member dies, or even that life ends when a family is bankrupt.  Truth is, life does not end when any of these things happen, nor does it end when insanity begins.  Finally, life does not end when the mind, body, and heart die.  The soul lives on!
         Brian had and has plenty of soul.  He has little control of his soul, yet there is plenty of it.  Perhaps, someday, he will live for life, by living for God, but until then Aeria and wind chasing will have to do.