For the wonderful collection of individuals known as my family. Copyright © 2013 by Joshua Turek All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Cover art by Britt Warner Written in the United States of America A Calm Quiet Place To Self Destruct Hello Upon first glance, it looks dead. But the desert is about silence and exaggeration. Enough time in the desert and one can see it is pulsating with universe and animal. The inanimate followed by the resulting life melding accordingly into what it provides. An ancient breeze shoves through in swells once belonging to the waters of a prehistoric ocean. The angularly decorative rocks stabbed upon dehydrated free spewing grounds have been, over time, fine worn into a sand. It is a collection of little worlds disintegrated to become a surface, the desert, bracing for a tide long since forgotten but still aching to be remembered. Roaring and raging. Listen closely, closer. The invisible ebb and flow of present day washes back and forth along all of this invisible space. A sustained gust of wind. It recognizes you. Clamoring its clamoring melody for your clamoring heart. Open em. Your eyes. Beyond dark matter, black hole tombs, and clashing protons is the picture of here. Like a newborn baby camera entering the world with clear and crooked lens, everything is distorted at first. Bright light dusts aperture. Commotion engages rapid shuttering lens. Continue, cry. Breathe in salty oxygen for the very first time. Engage the entrance for Earth's atmosphere to find its pathway down into the unexplored caverns of this fresh human body. Wildly create what will become an invigorating inhale exhale rhythm. Discover that second beat in it, the way it pushes itself back up to find its own release in the form of reciprocating carbon dioxide. Next, a milky presence. Everything is sweet, there it is again, it takes a moment to get into balance and coordination but only a moment. If timed with a stopwatch, the truth would prove miraculous in how quickly the human perception reconciles itself to that which has made it. The miracle of the truth. I'd recommend you begin staring intently at something. Anything. This, even. Hurry along, and find something to focus on because already running away with the thundering herd toward the base of the immeasurable horizon is a changing perspective. And it is this one big changing perspective that will defy, slink, feint and shiver against you in forms of bafflement for the duration of your own life. Specifically, it is the interest in comprehending that which is beyond comprehension. It happens. But now there is no time to prevent the landscape from widening into one horrifically happening abstraction. Notice something. Anything. Hold on to this something for dear life or drown in all of this space and illusion. There. You found one thing. It is an answer. Focusing on anything for long enough is an answer. Like that out there. That, a piercing object out there begins formulating. Struggling into a definition. An external vessel to emulate the material womb. Is it a runaway bullet train? Is it a toddler's space shuttle challenging what we already know of this life? Damn it. This oncoming atom in question could very well just be one gigantic plaguing mirage sounding through a nearby lover's lips. Kiss me. I kiss you. Where did you go? Where did time fly? A moment ago we were all born and now there is no scent of anyone else, even if someone known lingers in the periphery of another age. An age where we are not. We are not with anyone but your own self anymore. It is only you and your own self. The sand, craving a tide. "Sheeeeeooooooh!" Narrow breeze, whistling wind, the exhale of a slivered drift. Light bounces and refracts from the contours and shapes of this faraway loner now drawing near enough to suggest a self- recognition of machinating parts and inner dialogue. Someone is coming for you, trying to find you just as fast as you are trying to find them. Steady. Obeying the straight lines of fate infused by the crooked circles of human activity. The understanding of what is about to come is continuous and inevitable until it arrives different than expected, ordinary. Do not let your heart run away from you, keeping this organ close is necessary, needed, vital, we are beginning. I am sorry to rush you, but we are beginning. 1 Hurtling along the unspooling dull pavement is an aerodynamic white minivan. Complete with temperature resistant black tires, government subsidized ultraviolet ray filtering windows and a standard issue solar-paneled rooftop. This energy efficient American born minivan with hyper insulated sealed door frames would be rather amazing if viewed with alien eyes, but to people, as with so many things, it is only a white minivan. Tracing along the clean lines of the advanced three dimensional white minivan is a clear blue sky. And here in this particularly formidable region of Nevada, not even for a tick of a second does the stunning blue yonder give winking clue to any sort of slip-in-the gap conspiracy theory nor fanatical hint toward a somewhere else. Nor does the presence of the radically blue sky indulge flirtation with desiring anything more than it already has of itself. As the sky is unlike people; it is perfect in its art of simply being there. Here. Or here, rather, perpendicular to the road where underneath a high arching midday summer sun and that already contented coloration of just mentioned lapis lazuli wonder there exists the living motion of one supersonic jackrabbit. As in in those old nature programs that used to play on television, we observe with classical music as the first generation modified jackrabbit is cresting above and slinking below the dehydrated thorns and dusty brush with an unbelievable velocity and accuracy of living. All with a backdrop of unforgettable blue sky. Anonymous and alone, there is a beauty on display with the jackrabbit, a beauty in which all humble creatures can allude to if by themselves enough on this burning hot planet. While the blue sky becomes wavy lines. How like everything, it changes. How like everything, we change its appearance by over-recognizing it. So now, darting and leaping across the sparse terrain with its wild springing leg muscles and eyes activated in focus on executing precisely coordinated strides of forward motion and acceleration in communication with the environment is the supersonic jackrabbit. Watching the supersonic jackrabbit is like witnessing a ballet occurring right here in the middle of this desolate strand of open Americana, a ballet right up until the very moment and a half that this resplendent bunny is awoken from its reverie inducing samba by that previously mentioned white miracle minivan barreling its own eighty-two miles per hour through one thin vein upon this otherwise unchoked and breathing regularly vista. "Damn, roadrunners." George Falls forcefully exhales while immersed in his forty-two years of rapidly accumulating life and knowledge and everything spiraling at this very moment into the inescapably charged feeling of cellular panic. It is tremendous, this backward-rushing sludge of existence as a married American man, belly paunch, the smell of SPF 200 sunscreen, cargo shorts, family in tow, and all. The impact with the desert creature sounded like a thud, disruption, but resumed silence after the two met, grisly. Again, here, outside, where things are moving savagely with the force of rushing wind. Currently up above where George is, on top of the outer shell of this dusty roof of partially-sun- powered white minivan, the crystal blue sky dispatches everything, almost angry in its dominance, everything is that kind of blue except for a United States of America World War III Commemorative Edition Antenna Flag with red white and navy waving in the terrible winds. The shimmying flag bound to and flogging at the ocean of disruptive space like a patriotic cherry on one domestically-engineered mode of transportation sundae that is the white minivan. The flag decorating the bowl of dessert. In this faulty analogy, a melting occurs. The ice cream never standing an actual chance of remaining true to its form in this continually hot environment. So to sum things up, the ice cream melts into a discrepancy within the undulating material of stars and stripes where, curiously, a single genetically-modified butterfly clings to the fabric of the American flag. We find ourselves identifying with this yellow stowaway, black spotted, hanging onto the American flag for dear life and soaking in searing air through black antennas. That is until another dramatic bump in the sun scorched pavement disrupts the minivan and ultimately sends this temporary insect flying back up into its own arrangement, color, time, within the high definition sky. Before we even got to know it really. Goodbye butterfly. We are however bound to and mesmerized by locomotion belonging to Earth. Involved in this locomotion oblivious to any unknown hitchhikers and nameless roadkill in the minivan and so far from home, is our man, George. Inside. Beneath the flag, solar paneled roof, and atop his driver seat throne is George, maintaining his right-handed grip at two o'clock on the steering wheel while freeing his left hand from seven on the circular enslavement dial to, like an undercover agent, touch the backside of his freshly unchained sinsitral palm onto the vertical window beside himself.