“You can do whatever you want,” said the Bohemian, “as long as you know what you’re doing.”

It was his first night in town and he’d introduced himself at the local bars, this unkempt, slovenly old-school hippie type with his long hair loose and his beard in braids. No one knew where he came from or how he came about the money for his drinks.

“What if it’s illegal?” one man asked him.

“And who decides what’s legal?”

“Why, the government!”

“And who is this government?”

A short silence, and then “The people?”

“And are you not the people?”

This had them scratching their heads.

This was the beginning of the Bohemian’s campaign. He didn’t run for office, but he spearheaded five separate community-driven initiatives: a community garden to grow community food, a clothing donation recycling organization, a shelter for the homeless, a free clinic and finally a small public school that served as a community college.

“But who will pay for all this?” people asked every step of the way.

Every initiative paid for itself through volunteer labor and donations.

People started to become happy. They started to remember what was essential in their lives.

“But what about theft?” I asked the Bohemian one day. “What if someone has what I want and they don’t want to give it to me?”

“Is it a tool?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“If they are using it, why should they give it to you? If they’re not, why should they keep it?”

“But suppose they don’t want to give it up when they’re done.”

“If there’s a tool that they have but aren’t using and someone else wants to use it and they won’t let them, that’s just stupid. They pull that on enough people, I say let the government come in and make it a crime not to share it.”

“But why would the government do that?”

“Well, the government is the people, aren’t they? If the people want something, why shouldn’t they pass laws?”

“But what about the man who has it? Shouldn’t he be allowed to keep it, if he wants?”

“This is what I meant,” said the Bohemian, “by needing to know what you’re doing.”

Then one day, the men in suits came.

“Do you have permits for this?” asked the men in suits.

The Bohemian looked around at his neighbors. “I don’t hear anyone objecting,” he said, “Everyone benefits.”

They started with the community garden. “It’s on city land.”

“It’s land we all live on. Would you like to benefit, too? We might eed you to make the occasional  contribution.”

“It’s a threat to our economy,” said a man with round glasses.

“It feeds people,” said the Bohemian. “Peop who otherwise wouldn’t eat. How bad can that be?”

“You need to pay your taxes.” This one had a long, white tie.

“Like I said,” said the Bohemian, “You’re welcome to help out.”

The Bohemian and his organization were slapped with citations and fined. He didn’t pay and he didn’t let anyone else pay for him, either.

“Why should we?” This is a local issue. A local solution to a local problem. What do men in suits have to say?”

But in a windowless room inside a large black building, the Byzantine heard these reports.

“What about murder?” I asked the Byzantine. “Are you saying that if enough people want a man dea, they make it illegal for him to be alive?”

“If that many people want a man dead,” said the Bohemian, “I would want to know why. If enough people wanted him alive, they could stop it. And if they couldn’t, well… it might get messy.”

This was why I was nervous when the Bohemian was asked to the capital.

“We can’t have you breaking the rules,” said an entirely nondescript man in an entirely nondescript suit surrounded by endless piles of papers stacked impossibly straight. “There are reasons we do things the way that we are.”

“Those reasons must not be good enough,” said the Bohemian.

“What you fail to understand,” said the Byzantine, “is that this is a system that works. It works because every cog rotates in a specific direction. And you are clogging those cogs.”

“And what you fail to understand,” countered the Bohemian, “is that your system doesn’t work for those cogs. Probably because instead of cogs, it’s people you’re using.”

Sure enough, the Bohemian had an accident on the way back. I knew what had happened. Enough people wanted him dead that they had made it happen.

But I also saw what came next. I saw that the Bohemian had been broken in half like a cell dividing, over and over again, and now, like a disease, he was spreading. No, not like a disease. Like evolution. He was sprouting up everywhere, bringing change, showing people what they could do if they tried.

“Your way is too complicated,” they said to the Byzantine. “There are too many moving parts and we’re tired of moving for you.”

They wanted his land, so they seized it. They wanted his buildings, so they took them, too. They didn’t like his system, so they tore it down, did their studying and their research and built another one they liked better.

I went up North as far as North would go. I drove North unti even I could afford to turn off the AC, and then I went further. I wanted to go all the way. I figured if I drove till the road ran out and then made more road till my car couldn’t manage and walked, maybe I could keep people safe. Leave me alone at the top of the map to melt the icecaps.

But I couldn’t drive forever. Cars don’t work like that, and neither do people.

Most girls wouldn’t have stopped at the place that I stopped at. Too far from the main roads, too much rough, too much tumble. But there was a gas station and a restaurant/bar type place and I’m not the one you should be worried about.

“Get you something warm to eat?” asked the waitress.

I ordered a salad.

“You sure, hon? Want some coffee?”

“Water. Extra ice.”

She seemed concerned, but was trained well enough, I guess, not to question.

I noticed people looking at me. They’d been looking since I first came in, but I’d busied myself at taking in my new surroundings. Now the Gaze was deafening. I tried not to meet it. I tried to look out the window or play with my thumbs, but there was a loud noise and I turned and I caught his eyes on me.

Please don’t flirt with me, I wanted to tell him, but I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. I could tell. I knew his type. So I watched him walk towards me like watching a train speed towards a broken bridge without even blowing the horn in acknowledgement of impending doom.

“Hey,” he said.

Really, it was all he had to say. “Hey,” I said back.

He took it as an invitation, sat down, asked routine questions. Where you from? Where you headed? What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this all by your lonesome? I can take care of myself, I insist, but I keep telling myself that and then having the same conversations with this exact guy.

“You wanna get out of here?” That’s the question, isn’t it? What do I want? But that question is game over. Which makes it that much more embarrassing that this time, I was the one asking it. What was I thinking? Why was I giving in? What kind of girl was I?

Was I giving in, or was I giving up? Fine, some part of me thought on the way out to his truck after he’d paid for my food. Fine, if this is the person I’m going to be, maybe I should just be her.

Or maybe I thought that only feeling lukewarm in the cold here would make some kind of difference. Not having any real feelings for him, not being excited—what if there was a cure and this was it?

But I knew it was a fool’s hope, so I tried to justify it to myself.

“No,” I told him after he’d lifted me into the back seat. “Keep the door open.”

From the glint of his eye, he must’ve thought it was kinky, and I filed that glint away under lechery as an excuse for what awaited him. If he’d closed the door behind him once I’d said that, that would’ve been reason enough, I told myself. Disrespect. Right? But I was still cool when he kissed me.

I couldn’t stay cool for long. Think of every place he could have touched me in those first, like, thirty seconds, as touching a lit match to a piece of paper. Waves of heat rippling out under my skin. Forget the AC, I needed arctic waters for this. And then the moment of consummation—that would have to be like pulling the trigger on a flame thrower. I made sure I was on top for that, cold night air brushing over my bare back, keeping my temperature low.

He seemed to be enjoying it. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe that could be enough for me, to live vicariously through his enjoyment of my flesh—hadn’t that been the way for millions of Victorian women? But that’s not how things work for me.

“Stop,” I whispered in his ear when I felt the cold winds start to fail, then louder,” slow down. “I needed to ease up. Maybe if I just stayed at a simmer…

But he didn’t slow down and he didn’t stop. I tried to pull away. “Please,” I said—not for my sake, but for his, and it took every ounce of wilpower because it’s not what I wanted. “Please—“

He didn’t listen—instead he did my all-time favorite thing: he flipped me on my back, never disengaging. He pinned me down and breathed hot air into my cheek as he pounded away.

It was not what I wanted—no, it was exactly what I wanted—no…

My arm shot out above me, reached for the window over my head, for the cold glass, but if there was any cold left on the window, it could no longer reach me.

How could he stand it? How could he not notice what was happening to me? Pushing him away had netted me nothing, so I pulled him close and kissed him goodbye on the collarbone. He had brought this on himself, I justified it. He should’ve stopped when I told him. Did I really believe that? Do I believe it now? I try to take comfort in the fact that the next girl he tried that on would not have enjoyed it, rather than the fact that I did. Because the fact that I did had consequences.

By the time I’d cooled off, there was nothing left of him. Charred and twisted bits of metal and plastic turned the snow black for twenty feet in any direction from where I lay naked in the parking lot. I covered myself with my hands, not against the cold but under the delusion that by keeping myself from being seen, I could prevent this from happening again.

I keep wanting to write something about the first moment that an entity becomes aware.

Where does “awareness” start? How does it even happen?

Imagine an Entity with no memories. Fully-formed, yet completely new to the world, a blank slate of impressions.

What’s the first sensation it perceives? Is it the sand beneath it? The sun, up above? Is it even capable of distinguishing between the coarse texture at its back and the heat, or will it take a breeze, a sudden shift in temperature, a gust ruffling the texture of its skin, to provide enough context to make it realize it can feel.

If the wind does blow over it, will that make it stir? At what point will the Entity even realize that it has a body? That it’s capable of movement?

Its eyes are closed—must we posit that it has eyes? It has eyes, and they are closed. They are turned, though, up towards the heavens. As the sun shines down on its eyelids, it turns its field of vision red. But does the Entity even notice?

What is “sight”? What keeps us in our heads? If there was no sight and no sound, would we still think of our belly and our chest and our genitals as being “down”? Or would we live there, in the center of ourselves, only to be summoned upwards once we needed sight? Or is it our brain, perhaps, holding us prisoner? If our brains were in all belly, would we still think through our heads, just because those have the most sensory organs?

Perhaps the Entity must have some basic instinct. It should know just enough to be able to move when it has to, to react instinctively. Maybe it will even know to open its eyes—

Then what will happen once the new eyes are opened? What a sensory flood that would be! In the silence of the desert, to be suddenly flooded with light! Would it know the difference? It must.

But what will happen when it looks down at its body? Will it even recognize its own contours? Again, contrast. If a part of it wiggles, perhaps in response to outside stimuli, will it feel that change? Yes, and then it will know, it will know that is a part of its body. But what if it then looks out, looks up, and sees a withered tree against the backdrop of the sky? Will it recognize that the tree is different? How disappointed will the Entity be when it realizes it cannot wiggle those branches?

Once upon a time, there was a bisexual cat named Don Arminigo who was very good at hunting mouses. He would catch them, he would torture them; sometimes, if he got bored, he would eat them, but more often he would let them go. He had noticed that once he let them go, they became more of a challenge. And he liked a good challenge.

But the Insignificant Humans squatting in his palace were fearful of the mouses. They set traps for them, which Don Arminigo found quite distasteful. And one day, a particularly bold but stupid mouse Don Arminigo had caught, told him “This is the last time, Don Arminigo! Your masters are putting down poison and we’re all going to take it, because we’re all so sick of you!”

Once Don Arminigo had figured out whom the small creature meant as his “masters” (it had to be the Insignificant Humans! *scoff*) he was quite upset. But he got the better of those mouses—he found the rat poison in the pantry and he ripped it open, spoiling the Insignificant Humans’ plans.

“We can’t have that stuff in the house around Fluffy,” the broad one with the bald face said. “It’s too dangerous!” Fluffy was what Don Arminigo suffered the Insignificant Humans to call him.

And so it was that Don Arminigo protected his domain.

But he grew tired of chasing the mouses. Even the smartest and most agile of them were no match for his strength. He needed better prey. Larger and more terrifying. Which is why he trained the Insignificant Humans to leave the window open for him at night.

In the forest outside his palace, there lived an extraordinary Moose named Janet. She was eight feet tall and had antlers that could beat most trees in a fist-fight. “Antlers?” her friends would ask, “But I thought only male Moose had antlers!” Then she would turn her nose up at them and dare them to question her gender identity.

When Don Arminigo heard of this magnificent creature, of her grace and majesty, he knew no other beast on earth could slake his lust for blood. He saw her through the trees one autumn evening, munching on local leaves, and carefully plotted an attack until finally he threw himself out of the underbrush, leapt up onto her shins and clawed at the fur there like catnip.

It was several seconds before Janet the Moose even realized that anything was the matter. Assuming that the ticklish itch just over her ankle must be foliage, she lifted it up and then noticed it was still itching and finally looked.

“Ha-ha!” said Don Arminigo the bisexual cat. “I have caught you at last!”

“Oh dear,” said Janet the Moose. “I guess I’m in trouble now.”

“You have guessed rightly!” said Don Arminigo, renewing his assault on the rough fur.

Janet, now that she understood what was happening down there, soon realized she found the sensation quite pleasant. But, fearful that the valiant little hunter might stop or lose interest, she yawned “Oh, please, sir! Please! Not there! Not there! Oh, no!”

Satisfied that he had triumphed, Don Arminigo returned to the palace, where the Insignificant Humans had placed his food out for him as a reward for his bravery and skill.

This episode repeated for several nights as Don Arminigo ventured out and never noticed that Janet the Moose crept subtly closer to his domain, to cut down on his travel time. But then one day, Don Arminigo overheard the Insignificant Humans talking around their table.

“I’mana git that Moose!” said the furry-faced one, “He’s gon’ be food this winter and a nice fur coat for Betsy!”

The small, fast one’s face turned red at this and Don Arminigo grew fearful. Would they really do it? Would they really steal his prize? He found this most distressing.

That night, when he came upon Janet in the Glade just the other side of the fence from the property, Don Arminigo wondered how he could go about tricking the large, stupid beast into making it to safety.

“Gee,” said Janet, who had noticed Don Arminigo in the underbrush and wondered what was taking him so very long. “I wonder where that magnificent predator is! Maybe he’s forgotten about me! I hope he doesn’t come to me tonight! Maybe he’s lost the knack for tracking me!”

Unable to withstand such a taunt, Don Arminigo leapt out of the bushes with a fervor spurred by fear, crying “Aha! You thought you were safe, but I will show you how unsafe you are!”

“Oh, no!” yawned Janet, as Don Arminigo ventured further up her fur than he had ever dared till then.

“I’ll teach you!” cried Don Arminigo, “I’ll teach you to come close enough to my palace that the Insignificant Humans can see you!”

But at the mention of Humans, Janet’s eyes went wide and dilated. “Humans!” she exclaimed, and with Don Arminigo on her back, she charged back into the wilderness, never to return.

And there, far from the Insignificant Humans and their various schemes to thwart Don Arminigo’s natural instincts, Janet the Moose and Don Arminigo the Bisexual Cat lived happily ever after as cat and moose.

He likes to go hunting. He’s got his dogs, he’s got his boys, he’s got his guns. He likes deer and so does his wife—fresh venison really gets her going and after three kids in three years, not much else does.

It makes him eager. Eager in all the wrong ways.

He follows a buck and doesn’t even realize how hopelessly lost he is until he misses his shot. As the prey walks off, he curses and turns around. He calls out. There is no answer. He fires in the air. No one around fires back, or calls. He’s alone in the woods.

That’s where he finds her. At the bottom of a waterfall, in a pool by a spring, he finds her bathing. He doesn’t believe his eyes at first—why would he? What would a young woman like that be doing way the hell out here? At first all he sees is a human shape, beautifully light-skinned, with dirty-blonde hair flowing around it in the water. Curious, he moves closer.

She steps out of the water and he can tell, right there, dear God, she’s completely naked. She emerges from the water with perfect form, poised, only her wet hair clinging to her skin down her back. She seems so small…

Suddenly, she stops moving. Slowly, she turns around and he becomes self-conscious. He calls out to her, “Hey, what you doing out here?”

He doesn’t want to bring up her nakedness. He thinks maybe if he just doesn’t bring it up, she’ll think he just hasn’t noticed.

But now she’s turned to him and he can see her face. That face… she looks so young. Why, the girl can’t be more’n fourteen, could she? No breasts to speak of, no hips really, either, and yet what seems like a small thatch of—

Why is he looking?

“Look, hey, uh…” he begins again, “If you’re lost or something…”

She’s completely turned towards him now. She takes a step forward, leading from her shoulders and he finds himself raising his gun at her, at this poor helpless girl. He catches himself, then, lowers it back down.

He desperately tries to keep looking her in the eyes. He swallows.

“Do you like what you see?” she asks.

This is a trick question and he knows it. He knows what he should say, something along the lines of “Come on now, let’s get you home,” completely ignoring it. But instead, he finds himself saying “Yes.” Because he does like what he sees and he suddenly finds himself utterly incapable of lying.

She takes another step closer, landing at the edge of the water. “Do you like hunting?” she asks, much more enthusiastically, as though genuinely curious.

As she’s struggling to answer, she dips back into the water. “Yeah,” he concedes.

She asks him “And do you like to be hunted?” and at that moment, she disappears into the water.

Actually disappears. He cannot see her form beneath the waters, nor even a ripple above.

“Hey, you still there?” he calls. Then he thinks, somewhat benignly, But where are all her clothes?

The fact is, though, now he can’t even see her in the water.

The next thought to occur to him should be to wonder if the entire encounter was just some fever-dream caused by deprived horniness and guilt for it, but this is a thought that doesn’t occur to him because it doesn’t have a chance to. Because before it has a chance to, pain shoots out of nowhere across his entire body. I hate my name, he thinks, at the same time thinking that he’s melting.

But soon enough, the pain is over. His clothes lie in a pile next to him on the ground where he stands on his four legs and raises his antlers high. He likes being a deer, he thinks. His wife likes deer. He finds something on the ground to munch on until his dogs and his boys with their guns track him down and shoot him.

His clothes and gun are found, but his body never is—at least not officially. Though his wife is given a leg of venison to share with the children, and his friends make sure she’s taken care of for the rest of her life.

Once upon a time, there was a shirt named Fred. She lived on the large girls’ shirts rack at a clothing store surrounded by a great many Dull Gray Shirts. The Dull Gray Shirts did not approve of Fred because she (her full name was Frederiqua) was a Loud Pink Shirt with a picture of an Ugly Green Fairy on the front. Even the store clerks rolled their eyes at her as they passed by, if they bothered to look at her at all. And the customers? The teenaged girls who passed through the store, every single one of them, looked at her, lingered on her, and laughed in her face, before carefully selecting one of the all-but-identical Dull Gray Shirts that surrounded her.

But then one day, a curly-haired blonde girl named Shirley walked into the store. She was there with a friend and the friend was just like all the other Dull Gray Girls, but Shirley seemed different. She didn’t seem as impressed by most of the selection, but when she laid her eyes on Fred’s Loud Pink shoulder, she lit up like a beacon.

“Seriously?” said the friend when she caught Shirley looking, and soon launched into an invective against Bright Pink Anythings all over the world and how none of them could bring about social success.

Shirley bowed her head and left the store empty-handed, but a few days later, she came back alone. “I’ll show them,” she told Fred while waiting in line at the register. “I bet none of them even bothered to try you on. I’m gonna rock your look, I just know it!” Then she realized she was talking out loud to a shirt and smiled at the store clerk.

There were a few Dull Gray Shirts in Shirley’s closet, but only a very few, and those, according to gossip, had been foced on Shirley by her parents. That night, Fred was carefully folded atop a faded pair of jeans that only casually mentioned the record collection without talking Fred’s ear off about it. And the next day, Shirley slid the shirt on—she fit perfectly—and strode into school like it was armor.

“Seriously?” said Heather, the fried who had disapproved at the store, and with that one word, Shirley’s confidence shattered. She crossed her arms in front of the Ugly Green Fairy all through first period and then rushed to the restroom to change into her Emergency Back-Up Dull Gray Shirt. And when she got home, Shirley took Fred out of her backpack and stuffed her into a box under her bed with a collection of ripped, torn, scorched and poorly tye-dyed failures of Shirley’s childhood.

Over the next few days, as Fred languished, Shirley started to realize that there were a lot of things that Heather said that she didn’t agree with, but went along with because Heather seemed to assume that they went without question. And yet here she was, her and her Dull Gray Shirts, trying to fit everyone else into a Dull Gray Shirt when they could talking out loud to fairies on their chests. Or on their butts—wait a minute!

It was sixth period and Shirley didn’t realize it unitl they had all stood up, but the girl in front of her, Judy Chung, was wearing a pair of jeans that featured the Exact Same Fairy floating up the calf to the left butt-cheek.

“Seriously?!” Shirley exclaimed, which caused Judy Chung to turn around and give her a quizzical look. “Sorry,” said Shirley, “I was just admiring the fairy on your… um…” She was going to say “jeans”, but Judy Chung offered, “Ass?”

“Why, yes,” Shirley accepted. “I was admiring the fairy on your ass.”

With that awkwardness out of the way, Shirley dashed home after school and released Fred from her under-bed prison—which hadn’t been that bad, really: the hole-ridden flanel was actually a pretty decent guy, once you got to know him—and she clutched Fred to her chest and promised never to let her go again. Until she needed to be washed, of course. Which would be pretty soon, probably, because Shirley was very excited to wear her again.

And the next day at school, when Shirley saw Heather and saw the expression on her face at Shirley’s unabashed display of aesthetic defiance, Shirley cut her off with a decisive “Seriously!” and kept on walking, looking for Judy Chung. ‘Cause even if she wasn’t wearing those pants today, she was pretty confident that the two fo them would still match.

But Judy Chung was wearing the jeans. The jeans were named George, which was short for Georgiana, and the minute Fred saw George, they knew from the bottom of their hearts that the four of them would have no trouble living happily ever after.

Spring Logan was there from the beginning. She was the first everything and I thought she was all there was. She was beauty. She was sunlight cascading through her hair. She was the smell of flowers and the energy of youth.

But being with her wasn’t always easy, because knowing her meant putting up with Storm.

Storm Logan wasn’t a 24/7 issue. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, she was out of our way and I could enjoy my time with Spring, unabated. But when she did show up, there were thunderclaps right in my ear, and for no apparent reason.

“What did I do?” I asked Spring.

But Spring just shrugged. “She’s just like that, is all. It’s not you, it’s just a natural thing.”

I kept wondering how it could be that Spring and Storm could coexist like they did and yet be so different in their temperaments.

“It’s just who we are,” said Spring.

But any time Storm would come over, she’d bring havoc and leave devastation in her wake. I started to fear every day every night she might come, the things she would say, the fires she might light. “I can’t take this anymore,” I told Spring. “I can’t take her being here.”

Spring was sad, but she nodded and she smiled, and for several weeks, we didn’t see or hear from her sister. She stayed away, wrought her mayhem elsewhere, and I was safe. But I saw Spring lose her lustre. I saw the color drain out of her face. I would try to coax her out, but after a while, she barely even spoke. She didn’t even cry.

“What can I do for you?” I asked her.

She didn’t even have to answer. That was when I knew that Spring wouldn’t spring without Storm, that all the devastation was like putty in her hands she used to shape her sweetness. Without Storm, Spring was dry and barren, withdrawn. She was not herself.

So I called up Storm and stood and waited for thunder.

It’s been quite some time since I last saw Spring, but she left me with a bang and not a whimper and while I do not miss her Storm-dependency, I wish her well and acknowledge that she is better off with her than she was with just me.