Fantastic Metropolis

I remember that I used to teach the philosophy of hope to drug addicts and quadriplegics at a private sanitarium in Marin County. “If you get nothing else from this life, know one thing,” I used to say. “Know that every morning when you awake, the Universe is born anew. And know that within this vortex of chaos, you are the focus of change, and only you can choose to disbelieve it.” Of course, none of them believed me, even in the face of incontrovertible proof.

But now I must struggle on among the rotted remnants of this ruined world, turning and turning. Forced to take my humble place among the Dogs and Sorcerers and Whoremongers, Murderers and Idolaters, Seers and Poets and Lunatics. Between the curses and the plagues, the Beasts and the Burdens. Before the Sign but after the Sigil, before the Meaning but beyond the Metaphor, before the Utterance but well past the Utter.

You see, it turns out that there is a point to the Escaton after all, and that point is Epiphany. And he opened the seventh seal and inside was nothing but seal guts. Just like the others.

I remember nothing.

There was a time before, of that I am certain. But it ended. And when the last of the fallout has finally settled like a flurry of notions across an empty page, all that will be left are the lovers and writers of fiction, the tellers and occupants of lies.

I struggle to a sitting position, cough, stretch and pull my shotgun out from under the weather-eaten bench. To me it looks just like another goddamned day. Wanna go for coffee?

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

—W. B. Yeats

Max E. Keele is a bent, bedraggled gnome writing odd little fictions somewhere in the darkling forests of the great Northwest. He is published rarely, but has been seen in such peculiar diverse places as Planet Magazine, Nocturnal Lyric, Fiction International, and the occassional restroom stall. Currently, his time is consumed publishing a quarterly ezine of literary speculative fiction, Fiction Inferno, and scraping moss off every flat surface in his gnome-hole.