Steemit

“That stupid fucking bitch!” I am given one person to love in this life and I chose her. Unbelievable! Or totally fucking believable, seeing it held up to the rest of my life, totally tucking predictable. No white picket fence for me, no sir, nothing but this battle rifle and class iii body armor, and a god damn dead-man switch (which doesn’t even mean anything at this point, because now when I die so does everyone else anyway). Love is love though, right? Sure it is; and there ain’t going to be one fool ever who will be able to say I didn’t love her madly—be able to say that and make it true—no way. I loved in this life, and I could end the story right there and it would be A-freaking-okay with me. Fuck it though, since I have a handful of hours left until sunset, I’ll tell you a bit more.

He told her to believe in her, that he could write a story to become rich on Steemit, but she called him a dreamer, said it wasn’t practical, and she left him. He wrote the story, drilled those haunted words into everyone’s head, and it changed the world. His net worth skyrocketed and he became powerful. He used his power to destroy the world, in order to honor the vengeance his snubbed love demanded.

God damn right I did! Spent a week teetering on the ledge leading into the void of death, straight up committed suicide damn near, because I never for a minute thought it would work, and if it didn’t work I wasn’t coming back. But alas, here I am. It worked, and those words rose like smoke inside of my mind, and I had the courage to look at them, and to write them down. Jesus, how frightening that was!

He had gone back to town, clawed his way out of the desert, and stumbled into an IHOP on the edge of a no-name town north of Phenix. That’s where the world ended. He did a strong-arm robbery there, and by midnight the world had changed. He stole a five gallon bucket filled with pancakes and water bottles, a handful of sugar packets, and the waitress’s phone. His only weapon was his naked body and that scary look in his eyes. He screamed something about AIDS once, when the staff started laughing, and that shut them right up. He took the phone and bucket and ran back into the hills.

I drank so much water I didn’t even want to eat a pancake. I had a little nibble, then I pour a sugar pack into my mouth and chewed it up. I poured three more packs into a half full bottle of water and began to write. I took that chick’s phone because she had a full battery. I’ve never understood someone who roles out on a quarter tank. Anyway, I immediately regretted it because her keyboard was all fucked up, displayed all these silly pictures of an animated red headed girl instead of English words. So every time I came to a certain word, say, happy, it would show that stupid bitches pixeled likeness instead of the word, so I was forced to switch over to google, type the word into the search bar, cut it from there, and paste it to where it belonged in the story.

And that is how it went, hour after hour, he would scream into the night every time he came to one of those words, swearing murder on the whole world, seething as his body scrambled to take in the sugar, the water, and the little nutrients from a couple bites of pancake. 3,561. That’s how many words it takes to crumble a civilization.

I mean sure, society was in decline, had deteriorated into a fragile state, and probably wouldn’t have lasted long anyway, but I blew its fucking head off. Without me, with out those words that came to me, maybe it would have died from chemo a century later. It could have maybe even lasted longer. But I drug that little half-dead bitch out into the street, out there where everyone could see, and I placed a barrel in its mouth and blew that decayed brain all over the thoroughfare. The look on their faces! Those old hags who gossip all day long, hanging out of those open windows, months agape! The whole world shook!

He had done it, no denying that. He wrote those words and pressed “post” and that was that. By the time he made it home, a thousand miles away, he was the sixth richest man in America, and money had little meaning anymore. He had broken the world. He bought a building on the drive into the city from the airport. Once there he emptied it of its people and took a shower. He went to the roof and started building an army.

Army! More like a bunch of weak sissies, too god damn afraid of death, too god damn confused about life, and never fully grasping what I was doing. Maybe they were just what I needed though, I can’t say for sure. I was, after all, setting all reason on its head, and marching into chaos at a sprint pace, so maybe when you do stuff like that it’s good to have people who aren’t fit for such an activity. Maybe the more messed up and fumbled an operation like that the better things are. Who knows. I went straight at her though, even as the columns of the temples fell around me I went straight for that bitch.

Indeed, the city itself was falling, with glass shards in the streets, the scent of blood and fear, dogs barking. He had to build his misfit army in a world barely able to breath—a world pierced through the heart, grabbing its chest on the way down to its death—but yes, even during this he went straight to work going after her.

I told her to have faith in me, that I could write something down, that I could build a life for her with words, in words!, but she refused to see it. I could have written a large house with pillars on the porch, on a hill with a winding little road running past, and neighbors who were just close enough, just far enough, and a dog that didn’t bark. I could have written her anything, but she said no, said I was a dreamer, said it would never work. So I wrote the end of the world, and then built an army to go after her.

His army found her, behind the east coast warehouse of her father’s export business. They were planning on going to Europe, which would have been just as bad, but at least they would have had a few weeks at sea, where those dark threatening waves could have for once offered comfort to the human race. They could have watched the waves and squinted their eyes and poisoned their brains with drink, trying to pretend the world wasn’t real. They could have.

But fuck that! I caught them and sunk that giant boat with rocket fire, and I dragged that bitch into her father’s plush office, over looking that vast space with never ending lines of crates that will never move again. I ordered the death of everyone, screamed it, and then I ordered my army to kill themselves afterward. I’m sure they all just went out to die naturally, in solemn frustration, with the rest of humanity, but what the hell. The important part was I was alone with her.

He took her hand and she trembled. He asked her why she did not believed in words and she cried. She said that she knew now, and knew back then, and always knew, fully, that he had loved her, and this made him cry.

So what! So we cried our god damn eyes out. It was sad. I bet you would have cried too. Anyway, I said a few more things to her, things I won’t repeat here, and nobody else bloody well either, and then I sent her away. It was a coward move I know, but I just couldn’t be with her, not for the end of the world. So that’s where I am now, and you are all caught up. And look, we are just in time. I can hear it!

And that is where we will leave him—where we leave all things, where we stop, truly stop, and stop and stop and stop—alone and waiting for the end of the world.