What can I say that has not already been said. In the entire history of time, man has been conveying stories about his experiences, as drawings, as symbols, as words. Even animals leave behind trails that tell others following a certain story. One dog can smell the gender, traits, other things in the urine of another. What can I say that has not already been said.

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“You wanna know how I got these scars?”

You thought I didn’t lie. I didn’t. I don’t. That was a white lie. I didn’t say he didn’t cut them. I said I didn’t. I wasn’t lying. I didn’t. You thought I didn’t lie. Look at you, so disappointed in me. You with all your moral disgust. That sneer on your face, those lips curled up in repulsion. Because I’d lied. Moral principles? What were you, trying to do what he used to do when he didn’t like something? He used to remain silent, in case you forgot.

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The sobbing was soft. Almost unnoticeable. Then came the wailing. That was loud. It was not accompanied by it, but if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine the hair pulling pain that it evoked. The air conditioner hummed softly. He tried to keep his face straight. This was ridiculous. He had to stop himself from laughing. He knew how inappropriate it was. Given the wailing and given the situation that caused it. One of them had caught it. Soon, the others that worked there would catch it too, and then it would be their turn. “We’ll just send them home. We won’t let them in.”

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He stood at the edge of the mighty behemoth. It was on level with his feet. Water lapped at his toes. His legs were starting to feel the stinging that comes when your muscles are stiff. They were about to fall asleep. He looked up at Ra, if there was anyone that could help him now, it was him in all of his golden majesty. He looked down with a sigh. He knew no help was forthcoming. Indra was angry. Indra is what the natives called it. Not that his captors would know about.

He stifled a laugh. And failed. It burst out of him, uncontrollable. Loud. Raucous. His sides ached, his legs trembled. A slap on the head, he saw stars. He felt a warm liquid in his mouth. He has bit his tongue. Not that it mattered anymore. He kept laughing. His captors waited in silence.

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They stormed in. Clad in black. Armed with technology that was the latest, in use by the most advanced armed forces on the land. The message sent out to the public would be that they were armed with mismatching gear and technology. That they were ragtag. It would be a small blip. Not drawing attention to the message. Just putting it out there. For if you were to know the truth, you might begin to wonder, who had armed them. And the state could not allow dissent or for it to be questioned.

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He had always been a recluse. Quiet, shy, polite when spoken to. But he never spoke out of turn. To anyone. At all. He had always been a recluse. They had thought, and spread rumors, about him. That weren’t very flattering. He was a murderer, a psychopath. He kept children inside a basement, tortured them. Abused them. Things that human beings come up with. To accuse others of. And things they do themselves. He had always been a recluse. And each week, there was a new rumor about him. They didn’t seem to get bored of it. It was a sleepy neighborhood after all. Where nothing happened. They needed some entertainment. He had nice clothes. Which was unusual here. So why he chose to live here, when he could have lived farther downtown, or across the river, they didn’t know. He had always been a recluse. And they spread rumors about him. But when push came to shove, he was there.

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The school was glistening. The sun was shining. The wind was soft and pleasant. The birds were chirping. Footsteps pattered on the gravel. Not unlike the sounds of marching drills in the evening. And very different from them as well. These were sharp, staccato sounds like the other ones. These were disjointed, unlike the other ones. The air tasted of maple and fir. Transplants to this area. Lining the streets with the one stores buildings, remnants of colonial rule. Afternoon tea, with samosas and sandwiches remained from that time. As did subehdaars and batmans. The latter were superheroes of a sort. The backbone of the army. Officers that were the personal butlers of those in command. The mentality of those times remained too. This place might have cell phones, but it was stuck between a hundred and a couple hundred years in the past. The darker the skin color, the worse you were treated. As evidenced by the behavior of the school-children making their way to the cottage-like brick building. Religion was tolerated, respected, followed. Yet also not. It was selective. There was the evening beer for most of the senior officers. The soldiers, well, they were incredibly religious. They even disliked the criteria for beard length set by the army. It seemed to go against their religion.

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“No, no, no, no, no.” He half whimpered, half screamed. He put his hands on his head, almost as if he wanted to tear it apart from the middle. Eyes were wide with fear, nostrils straining, making a grating sound as air was being sucked forcefully through them. His mouth was panting, in between his exasperated, frustrated, and incredibly worried sounds and exclamations. Sweat glistened on his forehead. Eyes were wet and rimmed red. Forehead crinkled in a frown. He could smell the sweat on his tongues could feel the roughness of the air, covered as it was with dust. Sharp particles of dust suspended in the air like puppets hanging from the sky. Sharp as diamonds. He could hear the blood pounding in his forehead, could feel it throbbing. “No, no, no, no, no. Argh” he screamed and looked up at the golden sun. Pain. The wind was smooth and pleasant. Whistling softly. Humming a low, beautiful tone.

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When it had been built, it was not sentient. Life was breathed into it. It had gone through many stages. Treated as treasure. Treated as loot. Treated as and worshipped as a god. The last was the one that had hurt the most. Treated as a stone. A goddamned stone. That had hurt the most. And not just because it had an ego. It was because in this entire charade, and the purple veins on it glowed as it trembled, in this entire charade, the most powerful thing was belief. They ceased to believe in it, and its power would wane and fade. It would become, again, it shuddered, ordinary.

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He had heard it too. He knew, almost instinctively, that the other players in the game had heard it too. Something tremendous was happening. And he was in the wrong city. In the wrong continent, in fact. No matter. He could get there soon enough. He closed his eyes and sighed. More shocking to him was realizing that the two in front of him had. They played in the middle of a park, that though once had been named the center. Such arrogance, these humans. Maybe that was why they had never realized what was in front of them. Never realized as it had all started to spiral down and away and out of control. Now the park was torn and desecrated. By him and by the forces that be. These be the signs.

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He wished he could say he woke up with a gasp. He wished he could say he had been dreaming. But no, he couldn’t say it. Couldn’t write it off as a dream, couldn’t think anything of it but for one of two options. Usually both. One, he was losing his mind. Two, it was that gut feeling that he was coming to trust. That was guiding him.

He didn’t wake with a gasp. He had felt it. Awake. It was here. It was alive.

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Months and months. She could see the tarmac. The world was a messed up place, so very different from that of her youth. It had taken months to arrange this. But she was finally her. The sound of the pilot, weary, she felt she understood what she thought she understood about him from his voice, and from her few seconds of conversation as she had stepped into the plane. Weary. Tired. Wondering why he bothered to do this at all anymore. Couldn’t they see? The world was ending. But she, at least, and so did everyone, had a part to play. And play it they should. Because if they all gave in, then who would pick up the remains. If there were any, a follow up thought told her grimly. If there were any, she wondered and looked out the window. The tarmac was hurtling closer towards them.

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“I give up.” Even as they words left his mouth, even as he wiped the umpteenth bead of sweat from his forehead, he knew he would not give up. He didn’t know why. The logical part of him told him to give up. He didn’t matter on the grand scheme. His heart refused to accept it. Not that he mattered, he didn’t: he knew that body and soul. His heart refused to accept that he could give up on something once he had begun. It had always been like this, at least as far as he remembered. When he had lost his first fight, he hadn’t given up like many of the kids on the street. He had gotten up, and kept going. The crowd faded away, and in the afternoon, loo died and raw. Teeth missing, he had knocked down his opponent. Of course, the bigger boy had lost because he had grown weary. Not because he had acquired some skills to beat the latter in a matter of hours. But he had had the heart. He had not given up. And that was exactly what was pushing him on now. His heart. He sighed. His heart fluttered. I. Am. A. Pawn.

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It wasn’t the first time he had seen it. It was the second or the third, or the fourth. It was the first time he could actually spend time by himself with it. Sure there would be other people around. Sure, there were other people around. But what did it matter. In the throngs of humanity, you stood and died alone. None of this family nonsense. He had seen it a week ago. They had brought him here, then taken him back to where he had began. Three or four, he hadn’t been sure. Buses of people just like him. Brought him here, shown this, and a few other things to them. Then taken them back to where they had began. So he had had to come back. On his own. No, that wasn’t how it went. Had he had to go to his aunts? In Denver. Regardless, he was here now. Memory was hazy after seven years. Recollection turned into the gray fog of malleability. And he had been there, seven years ago. That is the now. Time is imperfect. Confused? Sorry.

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She sat in the room, increasingly worried. She could see what was happening down below. She didn’t have the means to control it. Her siblings had their eyes closed. They were unconcerned. She had never had the means to control it, just to write it. And once she had written, she watched over her stories. They were her own, and yet somehow, they were not. It was as if another hand was writing them. But they felt so real. Like it was her. Hand, another Hand, with a capital H. She believed their stories must be true. After all, their stories came from her. Somewhere, there was a creator. The original storyteller. And even though she had written the stories of all in existence, someone had needed to write hers. She closed her eyes, reached deep into her heart, and inside herself, began to sob. She had always known but never felt what tears were like, until they reached her eyes, and began to fall, thick, and heavy. Loud with great thuds. She looked at her siblings. Eyes still closed. It looked as if they hadn’t heard the drops the way she had. She looked back down. Slate and reed in front her. She grabbed them, and began to write.

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was it fertile. It did not willingly give life. It had to be coaxed, and coerced, and forced. Pushed. Beyond its limits. The tits of the earth were dry. Man could suckle from it no more. But he tried. What an obstinate creature. Stubborn. Stupid. He plowed the land like he had done at the start. And he understood that it was dying. He was glad. His punishment had gone on long enough. He had counted the days for millennia but even that had mattered less and less as age wore on. He had walked the earth, from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Swum the rivers. He would not drown. Living creatures would not harm him. They knew whose punishment his was, and also therefore, whose protection. He could die. Some of the dumb ones would kill him. But then he would live again. It had begun to matter less and less. Life and death. These idiots, they had craved eternity. Immortality was terrible. He wondered how He did it. He had swum the Atlantic. Swum the pacific. The seven seas. He had been there and here. Everywhere. Loved and lost. There was one good thing about them, he smiled. There was comfort in the arms of these creatures. They were his own. Of his own. Of course there was. But they grew old and died. He did not.

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The mellow heat of the small room like an oven firing up. He sighed contentedly. The taste of his breakfast was still on his lips, the satisfying juicy crunch sound as he sliced through the peppers with which to spice up his meal. He leaned back into the wooden chair and closed his eyes. The green glimmering in the kitchen light. The crunch and then the thud as the knife cut through vegetable and hit the chopped up chopping board. He could have done it on the marble countertops. But he didn’t want them to have scratches. Not even after so many years. How long had it been?

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He snuggled in closer. Then he got up, and put the jacket on. Zipped it over his bare, hairy chest. Just the jacket. Nibbled on the upper left corner, then used both hands to pull it up, covering his neck. It was cold. He paced around the room, she watched from the bed. The floor was dusty. The room, he knew probably smelled of hair, and dog. He couldn’t smell it now but when he left and came back in, he would. The culprit was now not on her side, she was lying on the bed, head cocked to one side, eyes intelligent and following him. The fan was soft, but it was so quiet that it was the only thing that made any sound. He breathed it in. He was tired. Exhausted. He rubbed away the crust from his eyes, stifled a yawn with a hand to his mouth, the gesture was useless, the yawn was caught in his throat. He gave in, and finally let it out. Relief. Another yawn, his face stretching, the tension in his muscles apparent. This stretch was relieving. He held the yawn for a few seconds more than necessary, and then let his muscles loosen. Turned his neck from one side to the other while looking at the dog. She cocked her head with his. He could hear the cricks in his neck. His feet dragged. The dust was scratchy and rough underneath them. Not enough that they would bleed, but just enough that he could tell.

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When they came too, it was all white. All blank. She knew everything that had happened thus far, and she had a feeling she knew everything that would happen. This room, this place they were in, felt like a room. It was white. The light was strong. Here, she felt this this room was blanketing her thoughts, but somehow, it was also giving her power. It was taking away what made her her, and yet it was strengthening her for herself. And for her role. What was her role? This place had no smell, she felt nothing. Her fingers, she could not fee them. She could see them, she could see the white. She saw the two forms next to her. And their stories. What their stories would be. But nothing else. No smells, so sounds. Nothing.

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