The Final Cut of an Avid Premiere in Vegas

I had a Kakashi bookmark so we held it up against the screen as a joke but the static actually cleared up. Mystified, we tried different bookmarks and objects with the same plastic material but nothing else worked, only the Kakashi bookmark.

We ended up taping it to the corner of the screen and it stayed there for 11 years until we moved out. When I was older people would be like “can you move the bookmark off the screen” bc it did sort of block a bit of the view but I would demonstrate the static issue and everyone was always just like “huh. what the hell?? well…alright.”

You get on MARTA at Five Points. The doors close. The train does not leave.

They call it the Murder Kroger, but the name always seemed absurd to you. You sent your son to pick up some meat from the deli half an hour ago. Where is he? The deli is empty. The slicers are impossibly sharp. The lights buzz above you. Outside, you think, an animal screams in pain. You decide to buy a steak.

There are 71 streets named Peachtree in Atlanta. None of them are safe.

The streets of Atlantic Station are hollow. At every step, you feel the ground crack like an eggshell beneath your feet. The music gets louder. A miniature train passes by.

It’s Dragoncon weekend! Lock your doors, turn off the lights, and find a room without windows. Pray that this year we’ll be free.

They told you West Peachtree was a one way. They never told you how long it was. Your shoes are soaked through. Your eyes burn. Your shoulders ache. A Camaro pulls in front of you without signaling.

You have taken your family to Stone Mountain. You can smell something burning. The gondolas go up. The stone-carved confederates stare you down. The gondolas go up. A ring of anonymous figures stands at the summit. The gondolas go up. They are always empty. Maybe you ought to try the zoo, the wind whispers in your ear.

The zoo is overrun with pandas. The pathways are covered in shit an inch deep. Nobody seems to care.

Creative Loafing is free, so you pick one out of a rusted newspaper machine. It comes apart in your hands. You feel inexorably drawn to Eddie’s Attic.

You turn onto Powers Ferry. You wait. The river is too wide to ford this time of year.

They’re shooting a movie here. At least, that’s what you heard. On every corner, the telephone poles are covered with yellow signs. At a cafe across the road, an actor whose name you cannot recall spots you. He licks his lips. You decide you’ll ask him for an autograph. His fur shines in the sun.

It’s pointless to go to the World of Coke, they say. We’re already living in it. A polar bear looks your way, a steely glare that bores into your soul, and you quickly down half the glass. You know what happens to dissenters.

You turn on the radio. There is only one station. It only plays country.

You wake up. It’s Sunday morning. You are hungry. The Chick-fil-A is closed. Your stomach rumbles. You go to church. You drive to another Chick-fil-A. The Chick-fil-A is closed. You feel light-headed. You go to bed. You wake up. It’s Sunday morning.

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…