Summer’s here: the sun is shining, the kids are playing, the West Nile mosquitoes are hovering in clouds of death. For many, the Summer is a time for travel, whether it is to a far off location or just to one’s “happy place”.

At Local Color, we asked our readers to send in their stories about travel. We left the interpretation of the word “travel” to the discretion of the authors.

In response, we got Grays by Christian Verotik, a journey through the relationship between us and our alien overlords; Kelly L.’s Wayworn City, a trip through the remains of a past age; and J. Robert Novak’s (I Believe in) Travelin’ Light, in which the narrator prepares to venture far from home.

These stories can be found here.

We’d like to thank the contributors, and to remind everyone that we are always accepting fiction, as well as essay submissions.

By Christian Verotik

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is several years old by now and was developed in Verotik’s writing group. He’s kept it to himself, but felt ready to reveal it. I hope you like it as much as we do. — Charlie)

They live in a glass house, with a floor made up of stones, but they need not fear. It works well for the woman, for she does not like to be the one to throw objects of reality, and she does not fear him, for he knows better than to throw his stones in their house made of glass. So, together they live, trapped in a life inside a glass house. It isn’t so bad for her, as she knows that she need never fear, for the reason stated earlier. He is the one who must forever walk on eggshells, for she can react in her own way, but he is never allowed to act in his way. It’s not all pleasantry for her though, for you see, she absolutely abhors him. He once loved her, but he’s no longer sure of that word, mostly because all the stones must forever lay on the ground, never to be touched by his hands. This is the life they live, inside their glass house, all because they live in fear of the L-word.

It started innocently enough. She was recovering from a bad marriage, he recovering from a bad case of alcoholism. Both were in need of companionship and a shoulder to lean on. They met mostly by chance, one fine Spring day, and they both seemed almost happy for a time. This was before they ever thought about the abysmal L-word. Together, they built up a fine house for themselves, a beautiful looking house made of fine glass, with pretty-colored stones to make up the floor. They quickly moved into their new home, never thinking about the repercussions of what would happen should they ever happen upon the L-word.

For months on end, they lived together in happiness. Mostly because they could look out their many windows to see the world outside, but they need never fear that world outside ever again. Both of them wanted to lock themselves away from the outside world, and they seemed to have done that task together. Then, the nagging started. Then, the abuse started. She wanted to control his every thought and action. He wanted to pound his fists against the walls and throw his stones, but he could not. She grew angry any time he did not follow her instructions or live his life around her. Her anger came out by ignoring him, by avoiding him. It was the worst anger in the world for a man who reacted by throwing stones. He wanted nothing more than to pick up the stones along the floor and begin to fling them this way and that, but he had to always remain calm, for he knew better than to ever break the precious glass. This is the way they lived for many months on end, and they were no longer happy in the least.

Finally, one day, she had had enough and decided to leave. It being her right to decide to do this and not his because he lived with the all-consuming need to throw just one stone, but this he could never do. So, he always stayed, and now, she decided to go. She opened one glass window and prepared to step out, when she stopped and sniffed the outside breeze blowing in, it froze her. “It… It smells of something…” she gasped, “Yes… it is… it is the smell of L.” She slowly let herself back into the house. She glared at the man who she had learned to abhor, but still she closed the window and sat down on the couch.

When finally she talked to the man again, she explained that she had never before thought about the world outside of their glass house, that it was full of the L-word. The man began to tremble a bit, “Not the L-word! I had never even stopped to consider the L-word! How did the world become so infected with L since our time in this house?” It was the end of the discussion, and from that moment onward, they learned to hate each other more and more.

He would yell and yell at the top of his lungs, but she locked herself away where the noise could not reach her, and since the stones were out of the question, he was left with no choice in the matter, except to suffer. She came to grow angrier and angrier more often with the man, not even stopping to try to understand the little things or tiny mistakes which he did; her anger at him was now all-consuming. This was the life they led. Many times they wanted to get out of this lifestyle, but every time they thought about it, the realization came about what was out there, they thought about L.

He came to fear L so much, that he made the decision in his mind to never leave her, no matter how painful it became, a life of helplessness was better than a life of L. She was not so sure in her mind. She couldn’t stand the thought of one more night in the glass house or one more day spent with him, and believed that nothing could be worse. Nothing, that is, until she reached her head through an open window and smelled the L-word on the breeze. Every time, that smell. She recoiled in fear and set firm in her mind that she could last a little longer with him. She kept fooling herself into believing that one day the L-word would not permeate the outside world so heavily, and she could finally leave her sickening life behind. He had no such false pretenses left in his mind, he knew that the L would never go away again, and sometimes he wondered what would be worse, for her to leave or to face this tortuous life one more day? He never fooled himself for long, he could never face L, and deep down he hoped she would never leave, because this life could never be as bad as L. Besides, this wouldn’t be such a bad life at all, if only he could throw just one stone…

by Christian Verotik

Living inside here isn’t always easy.
You can touch me, but I will not feel.
Scrape your hands on blistered wood.
The burning flames of ember waves in the night,
Calling the siryns out from the sea
For copulation, decapitulation, or simple extrenouations.
In here all sperm leads away from uterine walls
And into blood chasms of omnivorous termites.
Using clacked mandibles to exert influence over hardware.
Radiological bisects building corrugated genetic dissolutions.
No, it’s not an easy life, but it keeps one busy.
Gesticulations of the masses towards words made of metal,
Your hearts are iron, your brains rusted copper, your bodies candle wax.
Melted baby fat mixed with aerosolized acid medication
Used to treat what ails a dying soul breed.
Viruses in the base of our skull causing sentient awareness
Overuse of antibiotics creating lower intelligence.
Bread box houses to hold the maimed, cannibal lights in every room.
Do you know who lives alone with you?
Canjoled Aribeastry beings from quadrants outside your minds,
Impeached upon the world tree of Belgium and sanguine loss.
And, in the end, stomach ulcers and embolisms of sex, this is why
Why I’d choose the life of a wood louse over the dreams of sullied albatross.
It’s a garbage receptacle for the souls of the Jewish dead,
The legacy of Hitlerian economic philosophy taught at Kent State by discredited Yales.
Metaphor mixed my in head loose alighting saladiptious marketed cornerstones.
Jimmy Carter is a used shoe salesman in my refrigerated wedding.
And you, you, always for you…..stoneglasshouses and Napalm babies.
The Me would come later and never end with shopping carts full of uranium.
This is the face of Love in the Garden of Pines.

(Intro: a very personal poem from Christian. If you know him at all, you know where this comes from. – CK)

Bring back my lover to me.
The creation of pocket universes
to hide your pain;
Creating a world of bitterness,
Unhappiness, and the hopeless-
Helpless to find your way back
From where you were first banished.
Bring back my lover to me.
They say your sanity is the first thing to go
Dizziness and a pain in the neck.
Tethered to reality like a moth on a single string
Tugging, pulling, roiling through your mind-
Thoughts of disease, decay, loneliness.
Abandoned with your own self,
And I know I don’t make good company.
Bring back my lover to me.
Is talking to oneself really so strange
When no one else can hear? A land of the deaf and dumb.
If I could tell of the shaking, the aching
The busted brain and the limping step-
And the heart. Beating a rhythm too jaded to dance-
“Alone!” it cries. Night miseries.
No, this is not my world….
My life? Bring it back to me!
Too blinded by clouded waves of grain to see
It’s a good life, if you don’t weaken.
Now, there’s nothing left but weak shells
Without a sea of people. The crowds make my wave break.
Bring back my lover to me.
Coagulated blood and pills to make you bleed
if you’re lucky. While my number is thirteen.
Twenty-one to live, twenty-five to die. A roll of three.
I miss you all, but I miss Her most….
One more and bring back my lover to me.

By Christian Verotik

(Intro: How do you introduce a piece by the unpredictable Christian Verotik? Let’s just say you encourage readers not to expect the expected and just let the man take you on his lucid, crazy, thought-provoking and sometimes hilarious and frightening ride. – Charlie)

Let me assure you that I was once just like everyone else. In the beginning.

I’m trying to understand everything, at once.

I was lying in bed, reading my Bible, with my no end nowhere unemployed life seeping into my cerebellum, when a blinding flash outside the window aroused me. I wasn’t asleep, but it felt like sleep walking as I honeycomb stepped over to the bee washed windows. Peering through the periphery, I saw that the sky had been split in half. Looking across the horizon, I saw the normal sky as you’d see it every day, but in the middle was a gaping maw, but not a hole. It was a looking glance into Wonderland, X-Files, Invisibles, Narnia – all wrapped up into one. It was all.

When I turned around, my sepia room was bleeding colours. All the colours of the rainbow. First black, then white, then infrared, then yellow into orange into red. All the colours of the rainbow, all blended together at once. I knew at once physics was a lie.

The colours, they existed. They spoke to me. And, no, I’m not a drug-addicted, hydrogen smoking, schizophrenic, reality hopper hooked up to sexual stimulus overload meeting the dimension of hyper-non-senses deprivation.

This was real. Realer than reality.

Just because I can’t function, it’s the malaise of realization, the stagnation of the world, not anything mental. I is a word with vague memory meanings used to make our communication easier. Will Eye ever become I again? Eye don’t know!
My heart was racing the speed of light, and my arms and legs were jellyfish quivers.

Be calm. I was forced to obey, because it was like fingers pulling on the strings holding my brain inside my head. I was moving through a fugue state at this point. I think it was at the beginning, but it may have been the end or the middle. It’s all happens at once has happened is still happening.

The colours spoke to me from within my head, an ability lost to us 35 million years ago, if it ever existed at all in this dimension. It sounded like my ex-wife. The one that you can’t get over, who keeps you up all night, and sends you running and praying down the street to find a church like Oliver North without the homicidal, suicidal, genocidal tendencies, if you know what I mean? And, I do. They do too. Well, ok, maybe I lied about the not-suicidal part, but that was all before. The old reality, before I saw the panorama of reality spread out in all 5 dimensions and higher besides.

Cosmic self-awareness. I woke up to find the 3rd dimensional becoming the 4th, 5th dimensional. Every neuron in my nerve fibre tenuous cortex body was burning with napalm, but it was a sensation of calm, like a coat of serotonin dripping down over anxiety wounds. All I could smell were violets dipped in sex. Just like my dreams. No sound except every voice that ever existed screaming in your head, melting like candle wax into quiet so soft it made your brain feel like pins and needles. No motion but perpetual motion. My mouth tasted like barbed wire dipped in curry, but it’d taste different to you.

They’ve found freedom, and showed me the same, if only I could explain to you how.

They’re not higher beings, but hyper beings. Once fictional beings one and all of us. Imaginauts. I watched them move like punctuation marks between a space of thoughts.

Their voice/words exploded into my head with the force of the Sun going nova!

This is what they said, written backwards to make it read forward in your language.

They’ve found freedom, and showed me the same, if only I could explain to you how.

You can’t understand it from down below, in the ant hill, hive mind.

That’s why I have to go back to the beginning the Word.

The world opened up like the pages of a book and I saw the reality of our world existing as words. This is what I read.

They want you to believe the Logos giving it power with every dollar cent moral sold given to the Logos it was a warning from long in the past the ancients knew it wasn’t all tribal mysticism they had seen the future and we didn’t listen every day the Logos grows larger incorporating more mass into its Mammon mammoth greed body existing to multiply to grow it is the One the all and we worship it everyday not understanding the way it feeds but not caring for we want to worship the Logos

Death at two a.m., reborn. Stringing together two sentences, no! Paragraphs. I Am God.

Yahweh is Moloch. The two are forever one did not die became the two good and evil the same back to front line soldiers sacrificed on the altar.

Capitalism, a more omnipotent-present God than any other dreamed up by man, dreamed up by God, to be God, for God. You find it becoming One with God, inside God, all around God. An inoculation against God. You can become the God, move beyond the Logos. Only begotten Son, sent to Earth, to become a God on Earth. Humanity can understand.

This realization had me screaming like an abolitionist.

Yes, we all created God, but where’s the record. It doesn’t matter if the creation has been given the power of the creator then the inverse is the reality.

So, why don’t you all plaster 666 on your foreheads, for you are the anti-Christs.

Some Zen Buddhists teach that we all need to kill the Buddha. To become the Creator. This is the best piece of spiritual advice. Which is funny, because I don’t know anything about Buddhism. Crawling inside the canvas cranium of the Creator/nee Creation who have been given power by prayer and profit, burrowing outside from the inside, killing the roots. I am the Tree of Life.

It’s got me shaking to see what I’ve become/became/becoming.

This all probably sounds crazy to you, but that’s because it opened my eyes, all three of them, and I see everything clearly now. God is here on Earth. Let me explain.

In the beginning was the Word.

No. That’s two too far back. I’m getting behind myself.

We’re all trapped in time.

We want to get to today, to the Logos. We lost the power, they took it away, that’s what I’m trying to explain. Once you see, it’ll open your eyes, and you will be as unto God.

First there was Moloch, then there was God, then there was Trans-National-Corporation.

The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit – only in reverse and side-ways. The books is printed out of sequence and in the wrong spatial transmogrifications of the temporal.

Imagine the text as if it were alive, and you’ll see the way I’m seeing all of you right now.

See, I’ve been thinking about this, thinking it over. Moloch was a god of war, demanding the blood sacrifice of the first born infant. The God had gotten beyond us. It was threatening to overwhelm and destroy us. Perpetual war cannot sustain itself.

In an act of symbolism, Abraham refused Moloch. The sacrificial death of Moloch. We felt we had created a new God, a better God, the God of the Jewish named Yahweh.

What was misunderstood is that Abraham did not kill Moloch, he just transmogrified the altar. The Chameleon God. From the One, the Many, from the Many, into One.

Yahweh was a God of lies. Duality was a lie. The dual nature rested inside, like Adam and Eve, one into two, who became one. The snake. Unicellular replication evolving to the multicultural level.

The blood sacrifice never stopped, it changed. Instead of killing within their own tribe, the tribe found those outside of itself to kill in the name of God. Moloch was well pleased. Perpetual war cannot sustain itself.

God continued to adapt, permeating every level of society, we thought we could contain God.

First came Revelation. Earth is not the center of the universe. Life-forms evolve, they were not created. Nature works outside of God’s laws, a self-replicating force of its own.

Nietzsche told us, God is dead! He was wrong, and I can prove it.

God continues to recreate himheritself way, inside our technology. Your computer? Look at it. What does it say? Compaq? Microsoft? Don’t you see the Logos?

God became less transparent. He no longer talked from the bush. A new God for a new age. Technology created through the Industrial Revolution, giving way to Capitalism. No longer were our leaders picked by God, but through Godmoney.

Everywhere you look, you see the Logos. We’re not branded at a unicellular level yet, but soon the time will come when the barcodes will be on our very souls. A mass market cash grab to save our souls.

Look around you. McWorld, NBC mergers, AT&T telephone marketeering. The Logos is inside of everything. Our food, our communications, our technology.

And through it all, God has not become any more loving. He’s become more blood-thirsty, more greedy. Not content with tribal killings, he wants the whole world.

God is growing. The Corporation, the host, has leavened and mass-multiplied through asexual reproduction. The One into the Many, the Many into the One. The Trans National Corporation.

God has nuclear powered thermal biological chemical death.

That corner of the world isn’t infected with the God-Virus yet? God’s soldiers will move in and unleash the blood sacrifice, an invocation to God to materialize on the earthly plane.

What does this God want? Our souls? Why would hesheit want something himherit already owns? Quite simply, hesheit wants mere existence.

Everytime the paper changes hands, it’s a sacrament.

The Most Holy worshippers taking more and more of God’s rewards, trying to buy their way into Heaven.

The New Age Pope in the Pentagon trying to save his soul through the ultimate blood ritual. The orders from on high. A gushing geyser of molten blood, gushing, 43,000 non-believers, lost souls, and virgins sacrificed in God’s name. The pentacle sits dead center in Baghdad.

God needs more. More blood, more money, more land, more oil.

That’s what I understand. Those are the words I can tell you. This is what I’ve figured out when my eyes were opened and I moved into the realm of hyperspace for mere momentshoursdaysmonthsyearsdecadeseternity.

They brought me back too soon, too late, not soon enough. Impregnated my mind with The Word. It was the ultimate orgasm.

I need more coffee to write the sentences I don’t understand down on the paper. Physical speed working with the fastness of mental stimulation. The immaculate conception.

You see, I’m not a smart man. Barely graduated college. No more brilliant than you. It’s like implanted speakers speaking words from another dimension out of my mouth, from across the room and up in the ceiling. You see how hard this is for me to translate? My thoughts are moving on two time speeds.

Listen to me, my favourite colour is tachyon. It’s like the best PCP trip down to the occult book store.

So, can you get me some more coffee? No, no. Don’t get up. Just think about me drinking a cup of coffee, in your mind. Imagine me sitting here, talking to you, with an aardvark cup of coffee in my left hand.

Excellent. Now, let me continue.

Are you ready now? Here’s the message.

Forget your revolutions or your terrorism. Controlled conscious evolution. There’s no way to fight. God is in everything, is everything. The thing to remember is MolochYahwehCapitalism (The God Virus), were all created by man, for a reason. A reason so important we kept evolving the original concept.

Our only choice is to create a new God, a different God. Tearing the old paradigms down. One we won’t allow to control us. The Godform inside each of us, instead of outside. A God of individuality, instead of conformity.

The power will rest solely in US. Where it rested before we gave it away.

The Word.

There. That’s what they said. Word for word, because my mind is like a dictionary womb now. They got back in their flying funnel frog time machine and went back through the breach. Trans-temporal teleportation. The world closed up and became whole again. The 5th shrinking down to the fourth divided by the 1st dimension. That’s how best to describe their actions. It doesn’t work with our verbs. Verbs are insufficient to describe the new hyper realities quantum physics will unfold.

I was left alone. With my old, ragged bed and my Bible and my TV that only plays “Hogan’s Heroes.” A feeling of sadness washed over me, but not like a sink without a drain, less than that but more than sum of the parts. I don’t need to explain sadness to you. You’ve experienced more than your fair share.

My eyes stayed open. No sleep. An insomniac fit of vortex.

Please, you have to believe me. But, you never will. Cowering behind the safety of your outside organized enforced society, keeping you so safe through the blindness of ever looking behind the fourth wall.

I realize now there’s only one way to prove this is all true, and that’s to write myself out of existence. The purest freedom experience, hyper space, existencenonexistence. I become the Devil
.
Once this done, you’ll know this is the Truth, and it’ll be up to you to share the message with someone else.

I may be a fictional non-entity to you, but I’ve taken the power, and am now an actualized being. The creation has become the creator, and I choose to no longer exist.