content/ment

[milkmold]

<p>

Rules

Writing thread. Please do not post here. Under continual construction- I will post things as I finish them. I welcome criticism; if you have any commentary please pm me! I always enjoy hearing what people think of my writing, and would love to hear your opinions.

Table of Contents 1. <a href="<___base_url___>/threads/content-ment.222913/#post-5735254" rel="">but something changes, it always does</a> (mild body horror, finished short story) 2. <a href="<___base_url___>/threads/content-ment.222913/#post-5735350" rel="">arobots</a> (beginning of an unfinished short story, idk when I'll continue) 3. <a href="<___base_url___>/threads/content-ment.222913/#post-5735576" rel="">LA gods</a> (excerpt from an unfinished story) 4. <a href="<___base_url___>/threads/content-ment.222913/#post-5735897" rel="">anthill</a> (beginning of an unfinished story, upd8s imminent)


</p>

 

[milkmold]

but something changes, it always does

The sleeping lay vulnerable to any foreign idea that cares enough to be called to them. I am called by most people at one point or another in their chaotic lives, and I’ve gotten to know quite well some of the people who live more in dream, those who live under the power of us things. Those who so potently feel the stricken sense of unknowing, those who are always falling, always being chased. But that isn’t what calls me, that’s for others. I’m with the dreamers, both loosening teeth and being them pulling their own teeth.


I rarely see the same ones every night, much less multiple times a night. Yet here is this one again, the girl with a mouth that should be nothing but diseased gums and a heart that should have long ago given out. All she does is spit teeth, and all I do is move hands to teeth as she flees her subconscious. Usually she runs or falls, but tonight she’s chosen to try to sit out the pursuer’s search. She continues to pick and pull at her teeth though, and it seems the only thing left she can bring herself to do. Her posture slumps into one that feels like defeat as I continue rotting teeth for her to pry out. But then even that stops as I feel her hands drop from her mouth and the crease from her brow. She’s tired, slack, and the only movement is her tongue pushing against her lose teeth and the pursuer pacing through rooms far away. I slow, stop. She is so alone here, not even her brother is benevolent anymore.


I crouch next to her. The absence of motion is unnerving. I’ve already done all she can take for tonight, but I don’t think I want to leave her, not that she’d ever even know I was here. People don’t like to think about me, especially when I’m with them working away at their teeth. At least they’re forced into thinking about the pursuer when it chases as whatever being catches their attention most. But even the pursuer has lost her attention, and she feels completely vulnerable. I huddle closer to her. She doesn’t feel warm. The people never focus on that either, although I would think the idea of a bodies’ warmth and life should be pleasant and not easily forgotten.


Then I feel the pursuer jerk its attention back to her. She’s beginning to fade. It howls, but it’s a hollow howl. “ILIA! Come here, let me help you!”


She shrinks back, away from the doorway without a door at the end of the hall and towards me. I wrap myself around her being, drawing myself closer to her as the pursuer skids to a stop in front of the doorway. It’s usually not like this, when she hides it never finds her. It hurls itself down the hall, shrieking, “Ilia look at me, I’m your friend, aren’t I? You need to give yourself-" and then it stops, finally noticing me. “What are you...?” Then she turns, and I feel her eyes looking at me, not through me, and she opens her bloody, decaying mouth.

* * *

​

I lay still. I can’t move. I feel a chest, my chest? Or did I exchange mine for hers? I feel a weight on my chest as I struggle to open my eyes, although I don’t ever try to open those. It’s she then. The surroundings are indistinct as her half-closed eyes try to focus in the evening light. She stares up at the ceiling, its raised speckles drifting in lazy spirals as their shadows slide from under them. I want to flex, to open and close my hands, our hands, but even if this body could move, I wouldn’t be able to move it.


Then the weight sitting on our chest rolls off, and we can finally draw in a rattling breath. We shiver and close our eyes again. “Mmm-agh, that. That was a weird dream.” We feel a draft of frigid air from the open window and she rolls away, tightens her grip on the grimy blankets and shuffles her feet around, trying to tuck the loose blanket underneath them. We stay quiet for a while, occasionally squirming. Due to discomfort? The blankets aren’t particularly clean, and neither is the rest of her, although the squalor doesn’t feel off. “Mm, really weird, was that…? At the end…? Ugh.” Me? Is she talking about me? She looked at me, she saw me. She wrinkles our nose and opens our eyes to a squint. Wait, what is… Our squint blows up into a wide-eyed ogle as we jerk back and freeze. Nothing moves. We don’t even breathe, even our heart feels like it stops for a moment. The person… thing? Through the half-open doorway doesn’t move either. I wish I could lie and say it was cast in shadows, but the slanted light of sunset hits it perfectly. It almost looks heavenly, its misshapen, too-long legs and twisted feet wrapped in a golden glow. But its… eye? The hole in its head doesn’t reflect the sunlight, yet it feels as though it’s directing a searchlight at me. It has the presence of the pursuer. She then finds her voice. “N-noah?” The pursuer doesn’t respond, although it does begin to feel like the brother from her dreams. “What are you doing here? Is that you?”


This time Noah responds. “You need to get out.”


I cringe back, we both do. “What?”


He takes a step forward, and we fall back, off her bed and onto the floor. She hesitates, then scrambles to our knees to face him, although it has already left. She stands, and then we sink back to the floor. She grabs her cellphone off the bedside table, crawls into her closet, and closes the door. We’re shaking, and our breath is shallow and fast. She crouches in the dark and dials her brother’s number. As she waits for him to pick up, I want to tell her he’s gone, that she’s alone, that he might not have ever really been there. No one picks up. She dials him again, and again. On the third time he picks up with a sharp, “What, Ilia?”


Our eyes widen, and I can feel tears build in our unblinking, unseeing eyes.


“Ilia? What do you want?”


We still don’t reply.


“Ilia, if you aren’t there, I’m going to hang up.”


This time she manages to squeak out through our fear-swollen throat, “Are you mad at me?”


“What? No, Ilia-” he takes a deep breath. “Ilia, I’m busy right now. I’m a little fed up with how many times you’ve called me in the past few days, but you’re fine. I’m not your psychiatrist though, ok? So if that’s what this is-”


“No! No, have you, uh, were you in my apartment?”


“Wait, what? Why would I be in your house. That’s like thirty minutes away-”


“Ok, ok, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll leave you alone now. S-sorry, bye.” We quickly hang up, then grind our knuckles into our watering eyes. She attempts to restrain our breathing as it rises into hyperventilation.


Minutes pass, and she manages to bring our body back into control. She raises our head from our knees and takes a deep breath of the cold, stagnant closet air before mumbling, “Ok, so there was probably no one in my house. Big surprise, right?” She laughs a humorless laugh. “Maybe it was just a dream, maybe I was just seeing things. I need to check though, make sure I’m actually just crazy.” She laughs again. We continue to sit and grind out teeth for another minute, then she shakily rises and opens the door. The light outside has dimmed, but it’s still overwhelming after the hugging darkness of the closet. We sway, and she leans into a forward motion that carries us beyond the doorway and into the hall. She scans the shadows and frequents backward glances, suspicious of nothing as she makes a headlong crawl towards the exposure of the end room.


She blinks at the apparent lifelessness of the living room, and shakes our head. She lingers a moment, considering the disheveled entrance room, then turns towards the kitchen and continues down her wavering path. When she reaches the darkened kitchen, its scent settles over me. It permeates the house, but it dwells here. Stale food, rotting food… Then she flips a switch, and the overhead light flickers into existence, and with it, the images of piled dishes and half-empty take-out boxes. We draw our eyes through the towers of Chinese food cartons and over cities of moldering soup cans, then we sit on the lone chair of the cramped table at the heart of this bouquet for the senses, this kingdom of decay. She shakes her head and lets out a sigh. We close our eyes, and let our head slump forward. When we begin to grind our teeth, though, sharp pain shoots through our teeth straight to the bone beneath them, trailing a dull ache. The ache feels bland, like every night spent with her, with any stranded soul who has had the misfortune to visit me in their sleep. I want to clamp down, to feel the ecstasy of piercing pain and leave the ache behind. She winces, and a wordless exclamation spills from our mouth. We reach, prod, and find the loose tooth. Her eyes go round with horror as we continue to move the tooth back and forth, twisting, twisting.


Then comes the pounding on the door. She snaps out of her trance and bites down on our hand full force with the loose tooth. She whips her hand away from our maiming teeth, as she doubles over, then brings it back up to smear the tears welling up in our eyes across our face. The pounding comes again, this time accompanied by a yell. “Ilia! I know you’re in there! Answer the door!”


We cringe, then she yells back, “Why are you here?”


“What kind of question is that? I’m here to check on you! What the fuck was that phone call earlier?!”


Our heart is pounding, pounding like what is coming from the door in the living room. “I’m fine, go away!”


“What?! I came all this way, I’m coming in. Put clothes on or whatever it is you don’t want me to see.” A key clicks in the lock, and we waver. Then the door swings open, and she is sprinting down the hallway, climbing through the open window above her bed, landing on all fours in the trimmed boxes of thorny brambles beneath her window, and scrambling away as a yell of “ILIA!” follows her. Her feet are pounding, pounding like the furious beat of her heart as she flees down the harshly lit pavement under the overbearing street lamps. She turns down an alleyway and the harsh impersonality of the street turns to the softer light of occupied windows in the derelict houses crowding together around the corridor of asphalt, their glow overcast by the shadows thrown from the canopy of eaves. Shouting echoes down the row of houses, far away and almost indistinct, “Ilia, where are you going? Let me help you!”


What does it want? Nothing from dreams ever followed me before, and she's perfect, exquisite, the best of any of the others. Why did the pursuer choose her to try to take from me? She's mine, mine to possess, mine to manifest within. If she would just stop running, stop being chased, hide, do nothing, it might stop following me...


And we veer from the center of the alley to climb the chain-link fence guarding the public pool, out-of-season, drained, and abandoned. We cut our hands as we hold away the vicious barbed wire, and we cut our knees when we fall from the fence’s height onto the unyielding cement below. We pick ourself back up and begin toward the deep end, slowing as we reach the edge. When we stand at the precipice she hesitates, looking back toward the street and the now indistinct yells coming from what might be her brother. Probably not, though, probably not. Then we crouch and jump down to the floor of the pool and crawl to the middle to sit with the empty beer cans and dead leaves. We cross our legs and lean forward, hands instinctively moving to prod at our loose tooth. We dislodge it, pull it out, and she stares. It lays against her palm, crisp and pristine down to its rotten and pitted roots, bloody tissue trailing over the lines in our palm. Our arms then fall slack and we drop the tooth to the pale cement. I look up, and her empty stare meets the empty night sky.

 

[milkmold]

arobots

Light slides across my face as Lumi’s caretaker whirs through the hall. It isn’t looking for me, yet still I crouch behind the bars the white slatted door inside the hall closet like a fugitive slinking away from pursuit by the laws of society to squat in a desolate, unpeopled wasteland. I close my eyes to the streaks of light and will the dark to consume me, or at least hush my hitching breath and flush the color from my face.


Then, from the darkness, a choppy voice speaks. I jump in surprise, then twist and teeter to keep my footing as it monotones, “So are you going to scooch any time soon? You’ve been blocking the Windex for… wait for it.” The voice stops abruptly, then continues after a brief pause. “Exactly 13 minutes. Some of us are on a schedule, you know. And by that we mean everyone except you.” Oh god, the housekeeper. Although honestly, housekeeper is too mundane a concept, but the only title I can come up with just twists the order of the words. Keeper of the house. Colder, more formal, and slightly menacing. It isn’t exactly a formal being, but whenever I see its skeletal appendages lowered from dark holes in the ceiling and hear its clipped voice, I feel all the rigidity present in speaking with someone you don't know at a formal event where conversation remains within the domain of domesticity, yet outside any personal connection.


Formality takes over as I unfold myself from my ball of wallowing. “Sorry... Uh, I apologize. I’ll get out of your way. Here, just let me…” I run my hand up the silhouette of the doorframe, fumbling in its search for the knob.


“Would you like us to turn on the light?” The voice clips in again.


Oh god. I’m so helpless. “No! Uh, I mean, no thank you. I got it.” I fumble for a few more excruciating seconds before I finally find the handle, lower than the focus of my previous scrabblings. I shuffle out of the closet into the blinding light and turn, hesitate, then close the closet door gently on one of the keeper’s mass of limbs unfolding from the closet ceiling. I wait, but no noise tells me whether the robot still moves within the closet that I fully intend to return to wallowing in. I wait, then ask, “Are you still in there?”


“Yes. After all, we are literally the house. Omnipresent and all that. Or did you mean simple physical presence? In that case, no. we probably have better things to do than linger in the dark.”


Oh, great. Now there's a robot judging me in addition to Lumi. But I’m tenacious about wallowing if nothing else, so despite misgivings I open the door and reenter the previously empty darkness, now filled with knowledge of the keeper’s presence. I can’t get comfortable enough to descend into the tenseness of my wallow ball again, and instead remain facing the looming shapes of towels and cleaning supplies in an awkward, shifting stand. This isn’t going to work. Instead of caged reprieve, the gloom is stifling. I need to fill the gap. “Are you..?”


“We want you to know we’d be sighing right now, if we had breath. Hah… Hoo. There, a frame for you to build the semblance of organic functions onto.”


I grimace and shuffle my feet. “Couldn’t you just pretend to not exist?”


The keeper doesn't say anything for a moment that extends into oblivion, then replies, “Yeah, but that’s creepy. And again, we don’t have breathing to stifle to complete the image of shady voyeur. ”


“Don’t you need to be, I don’t know, shining something? Windex gets out of hand pretty quickly.”


“Swabbing dead skin cells and dirt from the tops of book cases doesn’t exactly take every ounce of attention. And as a host, we can’t leave a guest alone in the closet. If we slept, it would keep us up at night.”


The strangeness of formality turns to simple strangeness tinged with annoyance. Wow, I can’t believe I’m actually happy we don’t hire AI at my house. What, is it lonely? Despite constantly using the royal we? How relatable. But can’t it see I’m in no mood for people? Or rather, as it continuously points out, inhuman, clingy AI? “Ok, dear host, what’s your preferred topic of conversation?” Irritation oozes from each syllable.


It doesn't reply for a few moments, then says, “Do you want to go out?” this time actually leaving monotone for what, with a bit of wishful thinking on my part, can be construed as apologetic intonation. Despite reassurance I probably would have gotten from the departure of forced machine-ness, the way it worded the question makes my skin crawl and my stomach churn. Had it heard the exchange between Lumi and I? Of course it had, it’s omnipresent in its own words. Tears well in my eyes as I turn to face the door, teeth grinding, hands clenching.


continuation.. will happen at some point. this story isn't priority, though

 

[milkmold]

LA gods (excerpt)

The myth looked out over the expanse of concrete with budding buildings rising from the plain. The cracks were barely visible, the smoothness went on for so long, even from the viewpoint the got from the top of the augmented sky scraper. Even up there, the wind barely even ruffled their air, the land was so.. stagnant. They swung their feet, pounding against the concrete walls that housed the gods they had always looked up to. Gods that maybe had disappointed them with their.. unforeseen humanity. It was, after all, moderately unsettling. Of course, they were an immortal, so the strangeness of growing concrete and unsympathetic, petty gods probably wasn't as jarring.


Their eyes swung from the expanse that only ended then the concrete jutted up to form the gently swaying, overgrown mountains that cupped the unreal city in their jagged embrace. Only the slight shimmering of the dance of grass could be seen. The expanse went on for miles, the grass only even beginning to shoot up through the concrete miles out from the first buds of buildings.


They had turned their eyes to the sky eternally shrouded in pale. It never rains here, so I couldn't even say if it was actual clouds or not. Their alien eyes peered to the alien sky, and they murmured soothing words meant only for their own ears. The world shudders.


"Why do I even need to get to the mortal world? They say it makes you exist forever, but are any of them even happy?" They draw their knees up from over the edge of the spindly wooden platform to their chest as they continued to look up, as if praying to whatever it was the gods had to grant their uncomfortably present wishes.


"Life said she would help, but I don't feel any better about.. Anything." They shuddered with the world.


"She said she would get me a story, and would get me noticed, but.. It was only after I said Muse had.. said I was too boring, even for her.." They turned their gaze to the ground, far below, building blending with street into the seamless clay of the immovable concrete. The wind was as stagnant as ever, yet now it felt as if it pushed a little harder, pulled a little more.


Could an immortal die if they flung themselves to the embrace of concrete, far below? Would they be recognizable, far, far below?


"It all feels so petty.."

 

[milkmold]

anthill

I’m going to get right down to the core of this account. That prick right there, banging around inside that broken machine is guy who destroyed utopia. Utopia can’t exist, the enlightened disillusioned say, and the philosophers and politicians and unhappy masses are right. It’s because people like him come along trying to fix what they don’t understand and ruin the perfection that could have been by killing those with fragile plans that, if exploited properly, would uplift all of humanity. But here he sits, hammering and cursing at a ship that will never again fly, deep in a correctional colony on a dead planet far away from anyone or anything of importance, but not quite far away enough to keep from flinging the correct course of fate off its tracks.


Within the organic twists of the underground facility, within the stained and corroded synthetic plates making regular the irregular tunnels, an insect stalked towards the man with the haughty naivety of one who truly believes their cause is the only cause. She had been told that she needed to make it off this planet that spun beyond the sticks, but who would have guessed that she’d need more direction than that to get such a simple directive right. Not even the best could’ve known.


She strode into the flight bay that housed only machines destined for a scrap heap, scanned the room for something other than rust-bitten skeletons. A crash rang out across the room, followed by “Shit! Goddammit, work with me!” The insect turned her gaze toward the cursing, and began toward what she hoped was her target. Of course, who else could it be? There were so few humans in the compound you could count them on one hand- er, one human hand, that is. There were four. But Chevre was the only human there for classical reconditioning, as well as the only non-parasite mechanic. Someone dumber than the bug would’ve been able to find him based on those telling parameters.


She stood over him, shadow cast across the delicate, exposed wiring he was bent over. Before she could cast even one pretentious demand, however, she was cut off.


“What?” He looked up from the rusting aerial harvester he was tinkering with. Surely the insect was looking for someone else. But not many others were in the shipyard, and she was facing him. Although one could never be certain where all the beady, iridescent little eyes were pointed, it’s generally assumed they all point forward to form a gaze as driving as the aliens’ rigid step. That is, when the bugs were unmasked and their eyes could be seen.


“Don’t what me, I wouldn’t be talking to you if I didn’t have to. I know what they’re planning to do to you, and I know how much worse it’ll be if they find out you aided me in my escape.”


He squinted. She was as imperious as the rest of the Veschnim his limited experience had put him into contact with. “Wh-“


“I said don’t say what! Get up! You’re coming with me!”


“I really think that I’m not going to do that. You aren’t one of the ones assigned to me, and anyways, this is unofficial as fuck. Escape? I don’t even know you, why would I throw my ass into the frying pan for you?”


All six of her eyes narrowed. “They will ask questions, but not of your actual actions. You came here from a colony run by us, didn’t you? You know how we work. You all do.”


He turned back to his wiring, squinting through the shadow cast by the alien. He sighed. “You know so much about me, I’d think you’d also know to try cajoling over threatening. You’d also know that humans are dealt with outside your hierarchy, and they’d have to jump through hoops threaded with yelling politicians if they wanted to torture me.” He set down his soldering iron and folded his hands, still looking at the machine rather than up at her. “You haven’t even answered my question. Why should I care about you? For that matter, why do you care about me?”


She blanched, recovered, and flung up a hand, palm skyward, clicking her carapaced fingers together in irritation. “Don’t you know who I am? I-“


He held up a hand. “I don’t.”


Her mandibles clacked together, empty of words.


to be continued (i'll update this jazz later)