What follows is a list of things no human knows about me. What follows are instances in the great effluvia of creation in which I have found myself directly in control of God’s hand, like a golf instructor reaches around his student as their hips swing in unison. What you are about to read is a swan dive written in crayon on the bathroom stall of a dilapidated truck stop – the color is cerulean. The next several minutes of your life will be wasted reading this filth as reality squeezes the sphincter of the present and miraculously deposits the glorious future into a room temperature ceramic bowl. These are lies:

When I was three years old, I killed a man with my bare hands. He was a stock broker with a nice flat down on 5th and Turnbull. He had a propensity for bullshit and two kids from a broken marriage. His ex paid me in bottlecaps, and I took the man’s soul in a stripclub while a handful of dazed degenerates looked on in a confusing mix of pants-bulging innocence and abject horror. I was shocked by the size of this man’s Adam’s Apple – thyroid issues? No mistaking him for a Filipino trannie – set aside the pink dayglow tie, the putrid aftershave bought in a store with a broken tile floor and rust stains where the VHS shelves used to be. I enjoyed the kill, the taste of his fear mingled with sweaty, desperate ass and dirty money. The filth, the flaming dime, the fall.

In Reno, must have been a dozen years ago, what century is this? Reno. The virus was in the Fifth Stage and playing cricket in my marrow. Nails turned to claws, more stone than chitin or cartilage or dead cells. I had not intended to use them on this particular murder night, but I find it difficult to let stupidity survive. The victim had her five children with her in a rundown Wal-Mart – the old school Wal-Mart before the Super monstrosities where they sell artificial hearts and spaceships and Gummi Bears the size of Machu Picchu. Three of her kids attacked me while I still had my new claws in her. Without warning, the two-year-old, the one I did not suspect, dropped a thermal detonator and lit the place up. I’ll never forgive that little shit for vaporizing my favorite leisure suit. She killed her own siblings to avenge the mother that had just died in front of her. And I see this shit all the time.

I traveled some. Held a man’s head through a ViroSphinc on Titan, poor bastard just ate the methane rain like some pearled-up harlot was dousing him with bottles of century-old Islay peat-stinking scotch. I will never forget that smile – it said, “Death is just another bad song on the jukebox that somehow keeps getting played by accident”. It brings to mind “It’s Raining Men” or “Birdhouse in Your Soul”.

L-I-T-E

On Thursdays – yes, I think, yes Thursdays, most often – I get wicked flashbacks of my first seven years in the womb. This was back when I had to fight to survive in the dark and the slime. My brother had fleeting control over meson fields, a useless weapon inherited from a father that had no understanding of particle physics. He attempted to kill me everyday, but mesons are over faster than a lobster handjob. I eventually ate him. My sisters, on the other hand, may God devour their souls as I did, managed to burrow into my organs. Holly lived in my liver for a while and I fed her with brandy and methanol. Trixie eventually set up residence in my ear, specifically right on my malleus. She knew before the rest of my siblings that I was destined to be born alone, and so she took revenge by creating phantom sounds. For the past thousand years or so, I thought “Mexican Radio” was the ambient sound of the universe. I picked up a bad ear infection from a sexbot off Pollux Station and Trixie took the worst of it. The bacteria strangled her to death.

I still hear that damn song.

In my teen years, I discovered my reproductive organs and put them to good use. The first two of them I put on a train to Sacramento – hell, I didn’t know hippies were uncouth – and a couple of years later I found out I had kids. I still have my other two sex organs – I keep them in a box with a yo-yo, a 12-sided die, and tuft of fur from a Bernese Mountain Dog. I tell them that in Louisiana you’re considered an adult at 50, so they cannot come out. I planned to send them to one of the colonies – maybe Triton. It’s not that I don’t enjoy sex, it’s just tedious to have to explain that my race is retroconversal biologicially – we destroy you and birth your waste into the past of an undeveloped universe. I might as well ask if they swallow. I’ve had some lovers – the whales and dolphins were the most gentle.

After a long hiatus, I decided to get back into the assassin game. You’re welcome.

There was a period of time that grew a horn just over my left eye. It had a righteous Ugandan accent, barked orders in Portugese, and seeped bile like an American planet-hopper leaks quicksilver. We used to spend time together down at Point Lobos, watching the whales trundle by, while he sang David Bowie songs in binary. I miss the bastard. When he fell off, I was in the Hundred Years War healing up from a bad sword gash in the ribs. I suppose I was too distracted by the state of Holly, who had been cleaved in half, along with my liver. I saw him lying in bloody mud as the healers moved me out of the ritual tent on the fly. I roared for them to stop, so I could gather him up in my arms and say goodbye, but the war was ending and tea had been invented. We had no time.

And now, as you read this, I tell you honestly that I am in your mind. You will die by my hand, and the world will be lesser for it. Weep not, fear not – look not to the mirror or the lake for your savior, for I am one and all, singular and the same, death. I am yours.