#existential fiction

He was ten years old, sitting on the kitchen floor beside a beige telephone, pretending he was not waiting. His father had said he might call before bed. The boy kept one hand near the cord and rolled a blue wooden car back and forth across the linoleum without making engine sounds.

He said he needed nothing. That was the lesson.

Need made adults tired. Questions made his mother’s face collapse. Missing his father made the calls shorter. So he learned to talk about weather, roads, and cars. He learned to sound casual before he learned algebra. He learned to make himself easy to leave.

Then the phone rang.

His father asked the old question: “You don’t need anything, right?”

This time, the boy did not protect him.

“I need you to tell me if you’re coming.”

The answer was no.

The boy said the sentence he had spent years swallowing: “You left and I’m not okay.”

The world did not end. The radiator still clicked. A car still passed outside. The room survived the truth.

The adult narrator stayed beside him while he cried. He did not explain the future. He did not tell him to be strong. He placed one hand on the floor and let the child decide whether to take it.

Later, before sleep, the boy asked what would happen if someone became tired of him.

“Tired is not gone,” the narrator said.

“Angry?”

“Not gone.”

“Busy?”

“Not gone.”

The notebook opened after the child fell asleep.

The child did not learn independence.

He learned to disappear before anyone else could.

You were not born difficult to love.

You became easy to abandon.

I was twenty-something, half-feral and fluorescent with jet lag, on a working-holiday visa that had turned into a pilgrimage of accident. London had been grey noise and lager light, so I took a train north, chasing a rumour of silence.

The carriage hissed through fir and granite. We passed a station called Hel, which felt like a private joke from the gods of marketing. The air beyond the window looked distilled as if someone had taken all the colour out of existence and left only its soul. I disembarked at Foss, a name that sounded like the hiss of falling water, or a sigh through teeth.

There was almost nothing: a café, a rack of hire-bikes, one postal worker winding down the road on a small red motorbike, Hermes in high-vis.

I started along a path that slipped into the forest, the way a thought slips into dream.

At first it was the kind of silence that’s polite. Then it thickened and it began to breathe. Somewhere in the canopy, magpies rearranged the syntax of the day. And then fear, that clean, ancient fear that arrives when you realise the world is vast and doesn’t particularly care if you exist. I sat down on a rock to negotiate with my nerves.

That’s when I heard them.

Not 'heard' like sound more like registered the trees. They were speaking, not in Norwegian or English or even metaphor, but in vibration.

The trunks were resonating with a slow, sap-heavy grammar. I couldn’t translate it, but it went straight into the bloodstream. It said something like: You are temporary. Be grateful. Keep still.

For a moment I thought of black metal, the corpse-painted priests of distortion, and understood they were only trying to imitate this: the forest screaming its own liturgy of life and rot.

The voice of the land was both terrifying and tender, like being stared at by eternity.

When the spell broke, I walked back toward the station, carrying silence like contraband.

The café’s lights flickered on, and Logos, the ordinary, measurable world resumed its paperwork.

E uma das coisas que mais me tocam dentro desse jogo são as frases de um alien.

"Há uma estrela e uma estrela e uma gravidade perigosa."

"Há um você e um nós e um meio para nós."

"Mas não há nada e não é você e nada dura para sempre".

"Há uma dissociação da substância e uma gravidade perigosa."

"Há uma escolha e nós não a faremos."

"Há um nós e nós temos uma bússola."

"Há um então e uma dispossessão insidiosa."

"Há um nó e uma linha que se aperta."

"Há um pouso e uma permanência."

"Há uma linha e ela se afrouxa."

"O nós é uma trama que não pode ser desfeita."

"Há um você que possuí um padrão que estamos observando."

"Há conforto em uma nova comuflagem."

"Há uma reordenação fundamental."

He’s not gone. Not yet.

The silence swallows him whole, the echoes stretch into eternity… until a single voice breaks through the void.

The start of something beyond life — beyond reason.

Read the full chapter on HoneyFeed → https://www.honeyfeed.fm/chapters/147636

ALL THE THINGS I’VE WRITTEN AND PUT OUT INTO THE VOID. Figured I’d compile it and make you look at it from time to time in the hopes that someday, eventually, one person will rise to the challenge and be the first to read all of it. ;)

Updating this post to add: with the world being what it is, if you want to follow me additional places:

I’m zombolouge on AO3 and @zombolouge.bsky.social on Bluesky. Anywhere you see a zombolouge, that’s me, I’m the only one. <3

FANFICTION by fandom

Ace Attorney (639k words, 1 completed work, 1 WIP)

Dragon Age Series (1mil+ words, sequential, 6 completed works, 1 active WIP)

Mass Effect Series (415k words, 3 completed works)

A sequel Mass Effect Series (currently hiatus WIP, is related to the first but not connected on AO3)

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (185k words, 1 hiatus WIP)

Ninja Sex Party (43k words, 1 completed work)

Mystic Messenger (386k words, 1 completed work, and also this one is old and therefore a little rough around the edges by my own current standards but check it out if you want to measure my GROWTH)

There are also a handful of oneshots on AO3 amidst the bigger works.

ORIGINAL WORK

Luckless Series (fantasy, humor, heart)

Unlucky

The Lavender Dame

Standalone Fiction

8.5/10

“the Stranger” by Albert Camus

This was a book club read back when I was in high school. Again this was one of my first reads by Camus and it opened the doorway for me.

It’s not so much the story that draws me to this book, it’s Camus himself and his almost candid writing style. You can feel how each sentence is dripping with existential dread. You can sense how dissociated the character feels from reality. Everything sorta feels like it’s a mile away.