Extant Creations

I woke up and blinked myself in to a bleary semi-consciousness, sitting on the corner of the bed, rocking slowly back and forth as I convinced enough of my synapses to fire up for me to stand. Finally, gaining control of my senses I shook my head and stood up and stretched. I yawned, lips cracking, my mouth an arid wasteland tasting of burning death. My, I thought to myself, what wonderful side effects there are from so many years of chain smoking cigarettes.  I reached for the open bottle of Scotch on the nightstand and took a generous swig, replacing the foul, bleak smokiness with a sweet, lively one. I harvested the remains of a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of my trench coat and lit one, inhaling deeply, drawing in the day’s first jolt of nicotine deep in to my lungs.

As I tugged on my trousers, I surveyed the room a bit: an unanswered pile of bills on the desk, and the remains of a take-out Chinese dinner sitting on the coffee table. Not a woman’s touch anywhere in here, just the way a private dick’s office should be. Out the window God was pissing on us from up in heaven, mocking us as ever with a cloudy sky and watching us soaking in his urine. I sighed and wandered over to my warn brown leather office chair behind the faded oak desk, maintaining a death grip on the bottle of scotch as I carried it with me. As I settled in to the chair I withdrew a pristine Colt Anaconda from the top right drawer, and began cleaning and oiling it thoroughly, taking a draw on the scotch every now and then to wake me up and keep me focused. Satisfied with the fruits of my effort, I swung out the cylinder and loaded a single bullet. I spun the cylinder and slammed it home, pulled back the hammer, and held it to my head.

“Well Sam,” I said out loud to myself, “let’s see if today is finally the day.” I pulled the trigger.

*click*

“”Damn.”

We have decided to set down that which is we, just as our forebears have done from the dawn of history. We do this in the hope that you, the outsider, who is reading these words will come to understand what we are, what we have done, and why we have done it. We doubt we are like anything you may have encountered before, and so we wish to show you what we have done to ourselves and why. To show how we are an entirely new organism, at once one and many. To finally lay to rest the great questions you may have found lying here in the midst of our civilization.

I’m holding my breath right now. Heh. You know, they say not to… suffocation and all that… but sometimes, just sometimes… it’s worth the risk.

I am Jack’s aorta, and what Jack doesn’t know is that I’m trying to kill him.