Strip by strip she placed them, one side coated with a sheen of waxy adhesive, against the far wall of her apartment. She was almost done. The mosaic of flesh.

So many bodies had been sacrificed for it. Men and women and children sacrificed to become another set of strips upon her wall. But this way, they would gain purpose.  When Elizabeth Short was slain, she was adored with a smile that the world would not soon forget.

So too would her victims, their flattened faces pressed and attached to the top left corner of the wall–the stars of a macabre “Stars and Stripes”–soon be forever remembered as the paint for her  breathtaking ors d’ouvre.

She pressed the last strip of human flesh against the wall with her thumb. Then she stepped back and smiled. She had given her victims a gift. Immortality in infamy.

“The oldest words were written as song. And they shattered the universe into existence. They were written by my mother on parchment woven from probability and sung with a voice that cracked her womb, and from it burst forth Being. Resplendent and glorious, it burst within itself and grew at enormous speed. Being was even more beautiful than my mother, so it devoured her, consuming her utterly in eternal flame.

“But within mother lay still sleeping Being’s four siblings. My sisters–That Which Was and That Which Ought–and me–That Which Became–entered the very gut of Being. While our mother was consumed, we grew and ourselves came into Being. And so did Being make for itself a beginning and and an inevitable end.

“I remember this, when I think on it a while. But sometimes, sitting here on a leather chair, writing on a polished wooden desk, and feeling the sweat beading on my shell of flesh, I wonder whether it really happened, or whether am I merely mad.”

“Trick! I made you breakfast. It’s eggs with syrup!” yelled Andy from the kitchen.

William, who Andy called Trick, sighed and closed his journal and went into the dining room to eat.

“How far does it go?” asked Mark.

George looked at him, grinning stupidly like he did every time he got a bad idea. “I don’t know. I bet it’s far.”

Mark shook his head. “You know what I’m gonna say.”

“Get my climbing equipment?”

“No, but I guess that’s what you want to hear.”

George shrugged, still grinning. Mark sighed and threw George his car keys. After four years of college and two of med school, Mark and George had collected a variety of tools for mischief and adventure–their Daredevil Chest–which they kept in Mark’s trunk in case it was needed. One time, when they’d gone to Seattle to visit Mark’s mother, George had demanded that they jump from a waterfall he’d seen from the passenger’s side window.

Mark got down on all fours, his hands cupping the sides of the hole in the earth. George–who else?–had found this place online while he was searching for cool, off-the-beaten-path things to do during the summer break between finals and practicum. La Boca del Infierno, the local missionaries had called it back in the day. They had built a church over the hole, presumably to seal it, but it had burned down some 20 years before. Mark had no idea what back-ass end of the web had this place on it, but George said it was awesome because no one knew about it but them. And he’d convinced Mark to drive them all the way to New Mexico to the middle of the desert to see it.

“Hello?” Mark called into the hole.

“Hello?” the hole echoed.

George was on his way back with the equipment when Mark heard the hole add, “Please help.”

Mark spun around and crouched to listen. “Hello? Anyone down there?”

Nothing.

George crouched beside Mark. “What’d you hear?”

“I thought… I thought I heard someone down there.”

George grinned again. “Let’s go see. Tie me up!”

Mark knew better than to argue. He got George all bound up the way he’d learned when they’d gone to mountain climbing classes for when George had wanted to scale the Grand Canyon on their senior year. George leaped into the hole, and Mark let him down gently, despite George’s pleas to make him go faster.

George started to bounce on the rope, which made it harder to keep it steady. “Hey, George, stop bouncing the fucking rope!” yelled Mark. “You’re gonna make me drop you!”

No answer.

“George, you there?”

Nothing.

“George?”

Then the rope pulled hard, burning Mark’s hands even through the heavy gloves he was wearing for protection. The rope yanked one way, then the other, then relaxed, then pulled again, and finally stopped.

“George!” Mark fastened the rope and looked into the hole. “Bombs below!” he said, and he hurled a flare down. It hit the ground, not more then 100 feet down. The rope was longer than that, but there was no coil at the bottom. And no George.

Then the rope snapped, and the ground shook. A giant, scaly eye lid opened, peeling away from the layer of dirt under which it was hiding. Then it pulled down, diving deep into the earth and taking the floor and George with it.

The pod clicked and hissed open, and the first thing to hit me was the overwhelming feeling of drowning. Nothing wakes you up from deep cryosleep the way that drowning does. I clutched at my slimy throat and coughed out the gooey remains of the oxygenated liquid that’d been coursing through my lungs for the last–who knows how long.

I struggled to remember my name. Sam… Sand… Sanders! Private Sanders. No time for first names. I had to figure out where I was. The Advent… no… the Adventure… the Asinine… the Ascension! I remembered that I would forget things, but I also remembered that they would return to me in time. And quickly. I wrapped my head around the facts pouring into my brain like someone refilling a basin, careless to splashing losses of crucially important water.

Water! There was only a very little amount of it left. That’s why nonessential crew had gone into cryosleep. I remembered now. The flurry of pounding against the hull, the yelling, the officers screaming at us to wake up and go to the sleeping pods. All of us running, not entirely sure why. My platoon’s Sergeant had explained to us that there weren’t enough supplies–food, water, air–and we were being put to sleep for the time being until we had returned to Station 17. I remembered being happy about getting to sleep through this torturously boring mission, as long as I got paid.

I shook my head, pushing the pod door out of my way and finally sitting up. I realized suddenly that I was naked. For a second I was embarrassed, but then I realized that everyone else was naked. And then I realized that their pods weren’t open yet, and I wondered why exactly that would be.

I stepped out of the pod before I heard the singing. The alluring singing. There was something magical in it, and it felt like my memories were slipping again. I walked towards the pod bay doors, noticing with a strange and unwilling smile that the pods before me were all empty. Their doors were just closed. Which I thought for a moment was strange because there’d be no reason to wake us all up one by one.

I should report for duty, I thought. Then I thought how nice it was that the music appeared to be coming from the bridge. A whisper in the back of my head told me that I should probably dress myself before I left the pod bay, but I found it easy to ignore it.

I liked classic rock, especially rock from the 2130s and 2140s. But I had no idea what genre this song could be put into. It wasn’t even English, but there was something familiar about it. Like a mix between the song that played in your head during your first kiss and the song your mother sang to you to put you to sleep but nothing really like either of those.

The pod doors open, and a beautiful blue woman was waiting for me. Her hair waved in the air like she was swimming in water. She smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back, hypnotized by her perfectly circular eyes, the same color of her skin, and equally translucent. I saw my crewmates hanging from the wall with blue and glowing cocoons growing from their faces and around their bellies. The ones further down the wall had already cracked open. My Sergeant’s rib cage was splayed open where something had ripped and crawled its way out.

Then the woman kissed me, and I stopped caring as she pushed her long tongue down my throat.

We begin with a white canvas. First, there’s a spray of dark red–a simple line forming a curved diagonal along the canvas. Then another, this time nearly horizontal as our wrist flicks left to right. And another. And another. Slowly, like a Jackson Pollock, the canvas begins to fill with beautiful interwoven and some dripping lines, the earliest of which begin now to dry into an autumn brown. Another ors d’ouvre that we now spread out to admire. The canvas shimmers softly in the gold light that drips in through the pulled curtains. We open the locked closet and add the canvas to our collection of nineteen others, upon each an equally beautiful spread of brown lines, kept dry and away from the flies that so love to chew on the crusts of blood clinging to cotton thread.

Now the clean-up. It is not as enjoyable as the process of creation, but it is as important. A clear workspace is the haven of a clear mind, or so our father used to say, usually before painting our back red with a flick of his wrist and a fling of his belt.

We take the mop to the floor and whistle while we moisten and then swoosh up the film of thickening crimson from the floor. The mop reddens as well, and we plunge it into the bucket of water, watching the blood turn the water into a colorful mixture of brick-colored hues. Then we repeat, and we rinse, until the floor shines once more. Under black light, we enjoy the glow of the floor–the beautiful white and purple bubbles and lines, like bruises drawn in negative space.

Then there is the source of all our paint, the once-lively body of an exotic dancer, now empty of life and beauty. The shell is by no means ugly, but it will dry and smell, and this is a clean space for a clean, creative mind. We will discard this shell, and we will celebrate this, my twentieth piece.

And then we will begin anew.

I first noticed it when he walked away from the accident. A late night hike through the trail that led around Shadow Mountain that had led to a trip, then a tumble, then a fall through brush and thorn.

Victor’s body lay crumpled and broken against the side of a tree. I shimmied down the side of the mountain to get to him, keeping my grip tight against the branches that Victor hadn’t torn through during his fall. I had heard what I believed to be a snap, but my shock kept me from thinking the obvious: that Victor had broken his neck.

Then I heard the light flapping of wings, and as I turned around a bend of rock and tree bark, I saw wings surrounding Victor’s limp body. The blackness of the wings was palpable. There were no bodies attached to their ephemeral forms. Only shadowy feathers that batted against each other and the air.

In my shock and disturbed thought, I believed I saw the wings pry open Victor’s mouth and scramble inside like a black whirlwind until they were gone and all that hung in the air was eerie silence.

At that moment, Victor stood, and he grinned at me. A grin that told me that absolutely nothing had happened. My shock abated some, and I hugged him tightly, but he was cold, and his eyes were no longer their lively blue. A dull silver glow washed over them and gave me the shivers–just the full moon’s reflection, no doubt. He was alive, I convinced myself, and that was the most important thing. He was standing, and it was enough.

It was enough.

It was supposed to stop global warming. A light gas molecule that would zap the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by binding with it. In the experiments it had been very successful–and most importantly, nontoxic to humans.

It was released at various high-altitude stations worldwide, where it would do the most good. The sea levels were rising steadily, and people were scared, so vested interests pumped up the quantity of the gas released into the atmosphere. Enough for quick results without displacing the nitrogen and oxygen we need to live.

And it went well. Our combined carbon footprint declined over the course of the first few years, the sea level rise petered off, and the experiment had proved a success.

Among the raucous cheering after the announcements were the children of the Earth, who had been sleeping less and less. The children whose lack of sleep was turning the skin beneath their eyes black and swollen, and whose eyes were marked by red capillaries splayed around the pupils like spider webs.

On the playgrounds they stared at each other, as if they were having secret conversations, and looked upon curious adults with the stare of a hungry dog. At lunchtime they poked their food with dirty fingers and wiped those fingers off on their tables, scrawling incomprehensible words with macaroni cheese sauce as if it was finger paint.

When the public turned their attention to the gas as the culprit for the children’s strange behavior, they clamored to have the dispersal stations shut off. And so they were.

The following day, the children’s cries were heard loudly. They beat at the doors of their bedrooms, scratched at their flesh and eyes, and started desperately painting the walls and floors and ceilings of their homes with words in a language unknown to any reasonable human being. By morning, every child younger than age ten was dead, and not all from loss of blood or self-evisceration. Most simply rolled their eyes into the backs of their heads and let out a single cry before promptly falling limp into their mothers’ arms: “We are awake.”