Neon lights, moonlight, flickering streetlamps, and shadow through the bedroom window blanket us in an ever-changing quilt. Pearl wraps her arms around my middle and lays her head on my chest. I drink from the bottle of whiskey, both uncomfortable and comforted at the same time.

I step out of Bourbon Bandits onto the sidewalk of Geary Street and take my place among the zombies and psychopaths. How do I tell the difference? The psychopaths wear suits. The zombies have skin peeling off their faces and reek of rotting teeth and were likely the extras in a movie we were all in but forgot about.

I have outlived the stillborn. I have outlasted my usefulness. I have become an abysmal ocean sponge, ten millennia old, and just as wise.

She’s chain-smoking the whole time and leering at us like lambs being lead to some biblical character with a hard-on.

Fog is somewhere under the Golden Gate Bridge waiting to eat us all, but it’s staying there, invisible, for the time being, waiting for the right hour to cover and consume us.

It felt good, the match sparking a small flame into existence, and that small flame igniting an all engrossing one. Like the big bang.

Iron bridges hum and lofty buildings of steel and glass glint in the sun’s rays and lean over everything with stretched shadows.

People are slippery.Especially when they excrete.Or bleed.Or fuck.

You worked for Walmart, Nestle, De Beers, or some other corporate monster. You were wealthy but you often bathed me in pennies. Melted pennies. I let you because I thought you were infallible. I drank molten copper because you told me to. I would do anything you asked me to.

Before I dragged her by the legs back to The Memory Palace, I cut my unborn brother from her stomach with my bowie knife and flung his red-glistened body by the toe into the nearest garbage mountain, the nearest Hades.