PROTOVISUAL………………GRAVEYARDTREES

the happiest of happy birthdays to my wife @graveyardtrees on this lovely october 13th! 🥰🥳

mun & muse; cléo & barusu.

             snot and tears ran thick down the boy’s cheeks, pooling at his jaw, dribbling misery all over the pavement and the alien leather underneath his sleeves and collar.

            everything was different now. not a single thing had gone unchanged. his house was empty, mother was gone, and his sleepless nights were now dotted with intermittent life threatening encounters. of the fifth kind. the things that were ‘the same’ now dripped with a more potent venom. the abuse from his peers, the violent impulses. the more their knees pressed into his back the more he wanted to tear apart something beautiful with just his fingernails. maybe those had a correlation. maybe it was what made him a survivor in the world of gantz.

            even still... he was just a 14 year old boy. scared, alone in the world, and angry. what was a hiccup and what was a call for his mama became indistinguishable.

            but what he had in his bag was an equalizer. it’d bring the world down to his level. with ease.

            hell, it could bring it even lower. he could be this world’s god.

            what he needed was a human test subject. he’d seen what this thing could do to aliens---now it was time to see the real potential it had. obviously volunteers weren’t going to happen, and street cats were few and far between in the high traffic areas. no one who mattered could see him with this. it had to be someone the world would be better off without. someone who didn’t have any attachment to him.

            wiping what he could away with the sleeve of his school jacket, nishi had steeled himself for fireworks. crime was an imperative. he’d find it. he just had to look in all the places common sense told him to avoid. dark, cramped allies. behind buildings he’d heard rumours of being yakuza fronts. maybe he’d find a drug dealer, or a street vandal, or maybe even... no, a serial killer would be too unbelievable. not in japan. nothing exciting like that happened in tokyo. just alien death games.

            after hours of search and daylight burnt, the sound of tires skidding bald screeched from the radar of his y-gun, roughly 4 streets over. getting to the commotion via jumping rooftops was no issue with the power of his new suit. he’d slide down the fire escape under the cover of his invisibility forcefield, dropping to the pavement to assess the action from underneath a line of parked cars. the fear that gripped his heart was loosened with every beat, taken over by something newer. something older than society. something vile.

            nishi bides his time.

          a homicidal maniac isaac foster surely was, but killers are born and bred. human as their victims. water in a flask was as water in the ocean until tainted. soot and rot occupied the underside of his bandages where fingernails might have been under better circumstances. it hampered his ability to grasp the cereal bit by bit; a damp and unpleasant taste transferring into the porous loops and mingling with the so called ‘froot’ flavour. in he was hunger he was no more than a child, no different than he’d once been, a knee pulled to his chest as he picked through the bowl and stared into a shitty old crt with the volume cranked.

          as far as he was concerned, this was his day off. he’d been newly welcomed as a floor guardian a month or two ago ( maybe? the days all blended. it could have been more than a year. ) and maintained his post with... integrity. no one had ever made it to floor two since he’d begun. killing was fun and all, but sometimes a homicidal maniac needed to unwind in other ways.

          without looking away from the screen, zack’s hand extended to grapple with the bottle of coca-cola that should have been where he was reaching. under his palm was instead the familiar sensation of bone and flesh. “ha...?” his brow settling against his eyelids, he’d decided that maybe... just maybe... something strange was going on.

          “hey, shit tits. when’d you fuckin’ pull up? you bring me anything? this cereal went stale a motherfucking century ago.” tossing the box against the wall with an explosion of colour and tropical fruity flavour, his unoccupied fingers inched toward his scythe side-down on the concrete. “come to think of it, and that ain’t somethin’ you’re gonna catch me doin’ often...”

          ssscccccraaaaaaaaappppeeeeeeee.  “jesus christ on a motorbike, you ain’t even cathy. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”