The dream was about a dog.

The dream was about a dog that was a person that had died in a long ago war. The dog was a ghost too, like an interpretation of its original. It was older than anyone left in the known world, but it couldn't die. When it was mortally wounded, it would disappear. To make it reappear, you had to activate a piece of white quartz that the spirit was tied to, using blood or saliva. I discovered all of this bit by bit in the hollowed out belly of an old mansion in the European countryside where a group of us lived. The stone was found on a beach on the way to this shelter during the exodus that followed the oil fires. Maybe I should fill you in on that first.

After the 2024 global economic meltdown when the "terrorists" set fire to the world's oil stores, those with power seized what they could and ran. Former government officials, along with their financial backers who managed to get away, took everything they could carry, including engineers and scientists. Left with little in the way of order or technology, countries imploded. Standard forms of ground, air, and sea transport were rendered obsolete, most being too heavy to be moved easily without the help of fuel. Some of the more organized gangs gathered flammable materials and attempted to rig up alternate fuel sources, but infighting and competition from other gangs only led to further destruction.

Now, in the year 2045, there was a new war. Every human of fighting age that could be rounded up by the feudal lords was sent to a 24 hour training in what was left of the jungles of Vietnam. We were told only to bring one bag of gear, which we were forced to scrounge from the rubble of the cities, if we were fast enough not to be caught by street gangs.

We were not to bring animals, but surely the enemy battle droids, owned and run by the terrorist militia, made up entirely by former world leaders, billionaires, and their kidnapped scientists, wouldn't be able to sense a single quartz pebble tied to some ectoplasm...

The night before we were to leave, the dog and I were practicing battle drills in the basement tunnels beneath the old mansion walls. It was warm here and no one could hear the echoes of her barks as she lunged at me over and over again. She was a black, English shepard and she did not speak, but she knew what I needed at times. I had become overly reliant on her, I knew, but with little to rely on now, I could not help but to become attached. I knew there was something of a human in her, but I'd known humans with animals in them too.

The small, rough chunk of quartz was lodged between my lower gums and the inside of my left cheek, where I had become accustomed to carrying it throughout the day and night. Recently, I had become troubled by strange dreams of fire and gunshots, though even this was not particularly unusual. What was unusual were the voices. The others never heard them, but I knew the dog did.

All at once, the dog's ears pricked up and her legs seemed to melt into the long shadows on the floor. I waited for the voices to start up again, but within moments, I heard instead the wail of our alarms. The droids were attacking in the night. We would have to leave earlier than anticipated.

We boarded the boats silently in the blackness, knowing that a shift of the reflective coverings that shielded our body heat from the droids' sensors could be potentially catastrophic. What the other civilian soldiers, most shaking in the ankle deep water around their feet (both from cold and fear), didn't hear was the laughing. And at once I knew, it was him: the man that was once the dog.

I had believed that my finding the dog was a great boon, as the dog had proven loyal, steadfast, fierce, and gentle. The others in the mansion had become accustomed to her comings and goings and they shared a kind of wary trust with her. However, it appeared that these qualities were at odds with the original creature, at least insomuch as he was now. His words were arrogant, boastful, and most of all racist and horrifically rude. The dog ghost itself, though aware of the man's voice, did not change its behavior when he chose to speak, only listened intently until he went silent again. When the laughing ceased, she dropped her head to my lap, sighed heavily and went translucent, her eyelids showing through to the hollows where her living eyes would be.

Our first night in Vietnam, I had pulled watch, as was to be expected. The others believed the dog to be good luck. Here, we did not have to worry so much about hiding our heat signatures because the radiation storms in the upper atmosphere were such that no sensors could be trusted. My limbs were beginning to weigh me down with sleep when a cracking branch woke me.

The dog was returning from her night vigil, the sun still a flaming glow on the horizon that might have been mistaken for fires if there was anything left in the east to burn. She had brought something back, and it glinted between her jaws. Dropping it at my feet, I could see it was a shell casing, rusted through on one side.

Before I touched it, I knew it would bring trouble, because suddenly his words rang out louder than usual. The blank spaces of missing eyes in the dogs head widened at the instant my fingers scraped the wet metal and he was there. His boot kicked out at the dog who yelped and vanished in a puff of smoke. Before I knew what I was doing, I spat the quartz into my palm alongside the casing, silently pleading for the dog to return. Red streaks ran down my wrists into my shirt cuffs.

The man smiled and adjusted his helmet. One of the other civilian soldiers, awakening in the dawn, cried out in fear. The man was dressed in a manner the likes of which we had only heard about in stories, the fires having decimated the majority of earth's books. His clothes had once been green, but now were almost black with blood and in his hand was something none of us had seen for a long time: a gun.

"Where did you send her?" I breathed, realizing that the quartz was still pressed into my bloody palm.

"Well, that bitch sure ain't necessary now," he drawled out, and as he closed his mouth, the yellow of his teeth shone in the morning light.

Then I woke up.

Haikus for Winter Dreams

Oh to be buried
neath layers of maritime
snowflakes and seagrass,

The beaches at once
white hot and riddled the same
as a bent knuckle.

I dream of black dogs,
quartz crystal, and Vietnam,
wake to only cold,

chase footprints in shades
of blue and white, but never
find what morning took.

Here, we salt the streets
and wait for our loneliness
to bloom when spring comes.

The Headless Horsemen: Doeeyed

How dare you. How dare you do this to me, make me your ideal, your idol, your perfect seventeen-year-old romantic daydream. You don't know anything about me. Don't know that I've played this role before, in the drowsy truth between the sad dreams of my own youth. I have meant too much to people -- to men -- who have given me much too little in return. You, like they, do not have a right to my joys and fears and passions, because that is what this is about. My body, my face, my eyes, my lips, they're overtalked and dull and they were never at the heart of what you wanted anyway.

How dare you smile that smile as I mention Leopold Bloom. I am not available to you as some kind of psychic reflection of who you wish you could be. No part of me wants you to intellecutally relate to me. Your martyrdom is sickening, gut-wrenching, embarrassing.

Stop reading books that I've mentioned. Stop recommending bands that I'd like. Stop raising your eyebrows like we're sharing some kind of perfect secret. Nothing about this is perfect. Nothing here is good. If it could have been, it's too late. You and I made our decisions and your vascillating behavior disgusts me. Offends me.

Christmas Two-Step Cooking Lessons - Rewrite from January 2016

Today was a Harry and Hermione day and so we made Chinese,

talked about thinking, and played Blood and Roses 

until the mirrors of our idealism flared. I afforded myself 

a few lapses into the childhood of my language,

trying to remedy current events with a warm glow of nostalgia.

Here in this den where I feel comfortable and vulnerable,

my velveteen ears tucked beneath paws and feet,

even my failures are only small failures. 

Outside, the snow sugared the landscape and I was at once 

every wintered version of myself, doubled in the polished chrome 

of my ice-sugared innocence where that greater thing lives,

curled like a molten promise at the core of all our seed-like planets, 

hung in the great evergreen boughs of the human universe

where we can reflect the lights we can manage to catch.