u/LegitimateOrdinary51

(work in progress! I'd love some feed back this one, i've been working on it for about half year. Thank you!)

Journal entry 1

My name is Ozias, head commander of the Michael Unit. I was raised in South Lake Tahoe in a training camp, under the care of my predecessor Olga and her life partner, Asiel. My mother and father were victims of the First Wave. Like many orphans, the Michael Unit is all I’ve ever known. I’ve spent my life in training, preparing to one day lead my own unit.

It has been several years since I returned to Lake Tahoe. Most of my professional career was spent stationed in Los Angeles. I have sired thirteen children through donation of my sperm; from what I know, at least six women were impregnated. One day I hope to seek them out and ask how our children have developed.

Most people are not raised as I was. Those who had families before the First Wave often retained the old ways—ways that were chaotic, uncertain, and filled with sadness. Olga used to tell me of that time, of how easily people were lured into belief in the metaphysical—the most deadly force on the planet.

Ever since the First Wave, society has rejected the gods. We had no choice. The enemy listens for prayers, and waits for us to plead in our darkest moments. That is when they strike.

I was raised as a perfect atheist. I hold no belief in an afterlife—it is dangerous. I hold no belief in higher beings, magic, or mysticism. I do not believe in coincidence or fate. But this perfect material thinking comes at a cost: I often feel hollow. My atheism is not by choice, but by survival.

The First Wave changed everything. Many believers became them—copies of humans, but distorted beyond recognition. Olga once told me stories of the Vatican, destroyed for humanity’s own protection. Asiel, the gentler of the pair, believed that with the metaphysical went its glories too. Hope, the most valuable thing we had, was also lost.

I am now thirty-one years old. I have buried Olga’s body in the volcanic soil. The woman who raised me, whom I adored and worshipped as my own god, is now part of the earth itself. I am confused, more than ever. I now lead her Michael Unit. The orphans look to me for strength, but I cannot summon the courage she once carried so naturally.

Asiel I lost years earlier, to illness. They said in his final moments he called upon a higher power. For that weakness, he was taken. They devour hope, suffering, and the desperate cries of humanity.

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Ozias is just one of many who live in what is now called the Afterworld. The name is deliberately ambiguous, stripped of power. It resembles what the ancients once called the Rapture, but is neither clear nor divine. At some point in history, the veil between worlds was ripped—or perhaps humanity itself tore it open.

Religion is now the greatest crime. The creatures of the other realm feed on hope, love, and devotion. They provoke us with visions of demons, or grotesque distortions of the human form, until we are driven to call out to higher powers. That is their feast.

All religions are outlawed. Belief in an afterlife is forbidden. Physics, philosophy, and mathematics are strictly regulated for fear of opening gateways. Quantum physics is controlled like a Class I drug. Psychedelics and meditation carry heavy prison sentences.

From childhood, he was taught that only the physical is real. Imagination is suppressed. The result is a stagnant society—not apocalyptic, but hollow, joyless. Art is shackled to realism, stripped of transcendence. Families have deteriorated; men and women donate eggs and sperm to produce children without the risk of “metaphysical” intimacy.

The First Wave killed a billion. Everyone was touched by it. Michael Units like his exist to enforce atheism—the only “intelligent” way to survive. Ironically, we are named after the angel Michael, the one who slew Satan. In this world, religion itself is Satan.

Those who live outside our society—Subterraneans—still practice religion. They are tolerated only because they rarely emerge. When they do, they are twisted, distorted. Many whisper that stepping into their world would mean becoming one of them.

And now he  leads Olga’s old unit, raising orphans as she once did. But he feel emptiness, a longing he cannot name. A desire more than survival. A desire life.

Entry 1 section B

Beatrice was assigned to me as my protégé. She shaved her head and disfigured her body to appear as asexual as possible, even removing her clitoris and nipples to suppress all desire. Only her ovaries and womb remain intact. She takes vows of Muteness, she will only speak when it is necessary. she has like so many other young women in her position chosen a philosophy of abstinence of all forms of pleasure including conversation. her sentences are short and meaningful and always thoughtful .

Her task is to embody repression, to extinguish pleasure so thoroughly that the enemy cannot find her. A miserable existence—but, in her mind, necessary. And yet, despite this self-denial, Beatrice shows immense tenderness toward the children. Affection is her only joy. I admire her for it, though I fear her suppression will drive her to madness, as it has others.

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Entry 3 ( 2 is missing)

Two years into my command, I received reports of Subterraneans passing out illegal books—copies of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. A dangerous text, though seemingly harmless. It maps the architecture of myth, of belief, of transcendence.

I tracked the man down, a distorted being from below. Once human, once African-American perhaps, now twisted with too many eyes and broken wings. Without hesitation, I shot him. He died smiling.Is Serene face clutched the book to his chest as if he was untouchable and reached to An ethereal state  that I would never dare to reach. why was he smiling? he was dead there is no afterlife. if there was one if there is one they reside there and they would Feast upon what is left of him. why die smiling? Perhaps it is relief? come to think of it he didn't dodge the bullet he is almost as if he was waiting for it. perhaps he wanted to die living in that deformed State could not be comfortable. but his face that knowing. it's a hunting Perhaps is just figment Jarred my psyche more than I'd like to admit. 

We burned every copy of the book, along with his body. In our world, empathy means destroying dangerous ideas before they can infect others. I quoted from the Book of Logic, our closest thing to a Religious text: “Text cannot harm you. Only belief in it can.”

The flames consumed everything—or so I thought. But the creatures were watching. They always are. A fragment escaped the fire, a line from Campbell’s forbidden book:

“The hero faces their greatest fear or a significant crisis, often a ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ experience.”

By chance—it clung to my shoe…. I didn’t know at the time it was attached to and by obscene amounts of events i would find myself reading it. 

The words themselves did not haunt me. The idea sparked nothing divine—thank goodness. But they echoed all the same:

“The hero’s greatest fear or significant crisis often a death or rebirth experience.”

That clung to me. Like scraps to my shoe. 

I thought of Olga—my teacher, my mother. She had seen the world before it became this. Beneath her camouflage of anger and regret, there was a warmth that was—lacking a better term—supernatural. The thought terrified me. That one sentence had rooted itself in my mind so quickly, with little to no effort. This was dangerous—extremely dangerous.

I ripped the paper to shreds and burned it, clutching my chest as if suffering a heart attack. The fear that such a text could seed in my mind, giving me hope, was unbearable. Hope is poison.

I ran to the Book of Logic and turned to the section on fear. It explained the chemicals in the brain, and what I must do to calm them. I closed my eyes, counted to three, and drew three deep breaths. Slowly, my nervous system obeyed.

They will not catch me. They will not infiltrate this Michael Unit. These children will be safe.

Mantra was safe. Meditation is strictly forbidden, but mantras are safe. As long as it calms down my nervous system and I do not give it any spiritual power. My mind calmed, I realized the power of text and the danger of it. Unfortunately I cannot tell anyone but I encountered the passage it would be considered treason and I will be executed.  and justly so. these children look to me as their mentor and the closest thing we will ever have to a father. unfortunately I will have to keep this Forbidden Knowledge buried within my subconscious. if it becomes too much I will end my life. for the good of the children and for society. 

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Entry 3 section C

Olga once told me suicide was rare in the old world—that it was even considered shameful. Now it is common, almost ordinary. They say a cure is coming soon. Depression, after all, is nothing but chemicals lying to us, much like the creatures themselves. Rumor even whispers that the creatures may be the cause of this profound despair.

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Entry  Unkown section

I will not tell Beatrice what I read. It would frighten her. Her disposition is too soft, too delicate. It would be cruel to plant that seed in her mind.

Recently, I entered her quarters. Her shirt was off. At first, I averted my eyes out of respect, but then I remembered her surgery. Her nipples had been removed in such a way that she resembled a doll, childlike in her deformity. She was so thin I could see every rib. Her hair shaved to the scalp, her eyebrows erased. And yet—despite all this—her beauty shone through. Her eyes were inviting and soft, her skin nearly flawless. No amount of suppression could erase what radiated from her.

She cloaks herself in long  shapeless gown, hiding every trace of form. An extreme act of devotion to the Michael Unit. And still, she has become my greatest treasure and friend

Her voice is gentle, sing-song, a balm. Sometimes I speak to her simply to hear it, though I fear indulging too much under the watch of ever-present enemies. Even small glimpses satisfy my ears.

I try not to imagine her as a ‘normal’ woman, but my tired mind betrays me. What color would her hair be, if she let it grow? Black? Red? Perhaps strawberry blonde, to match her strange lashes—halfway between brown and red. Her ancestry is difficult to place. Pale skin, but not quite European. Perhaps Arab. Perhaps something else.

Every movement of hers is precise, controlled. The way she touches objects is so delicate it feels sacred. To speak cruelly to her would feel like a deeper wrong. The word sin comes to mind, though I know it is forbidden. Yet it is the only word that fits.

If the world were different, she would be a nun. Her body intact, her hair flowing. I would never see her as an object—such a thought is grotesque. But I see her as something sacred. A different kind of sacred.

I wish I had the word for it.

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Entry 4 (Section A)

It has been three weeks since I read the excerpt from the book. Three weeks, and still it will not leave my mind. Perhaps this is a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder, though I cannot say if I have the condition. I know it can emerge in anyone if the brain’s chemistry allows.

I have been under tremendous stress—feeding the children, training them. There is a young girl, Persephone, who has shown remarkable promise. For one so young, she is composed, logical, and fierce. Just the other day, she took down a teenage boy in a practice knife fight with effortless precision.

Beatrice oversees the children’s combat lessons and updates me daily. The way she speaks of Persephone, it is as though she is witnessing a hero in the making. I am filled with feelings I can only describe as harmonious—dangerously close to reverence. One day, perhaps, this young girl could even resist or seduce the creatures.

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Entry Unknown

Today is not a good day. The words of Joseph Campbell—cursed words—still echo in my mind. And I must teach the children what their enemy looks like and how to survive them.

I have drawn countless images, yet none do them justice. The creatures vary. Some are unbearably beautiful—so much so that humans devote themselves willingly, worshiping even as they are devoured. Scientists say the creatures release pheromones that trick our nervous systems into perceiving them as divine presences—angels, demons, gods.

The others I call the common type—grotesque horrors, distorted echoes of humanity. A sickly pregnant woman. An old man who looks like he needs help. The details are never right—the wrong skin tone, warped proportions. Naked to the eye, their imperfection betrays them. Worst of all is when they appear as children. The disfigurements strike at the deepest root of the Uncanny Valley, and the mind recoils in primal terror.

Today, I will teach the children not to hope. Faith is too dangerous. We reframe it, using different words. We never say hope; we say condition or situation. Example: “If we understand our condition, our situation may improve.” Neutral, secular. But even “improvement” has grown dangerous. One political official, too impassioned at the podium, repeated it too many times. Sightings of the creatures followed outside the hall. She was jailed for several months. Words are powerful. Belief is poison. Speech must be careful, concise—without the infection of faith.

The word faith is forbidden, so instead we use ideal. It skirts the edge of the metaphysical—neutral enough not to imply divinity, vague enough to suggest a higher purpose. Awkward, yes, but with training the children will learn the danger of certain words, and the safety of others.

There is one thing I long to say freely—but even here, I hesitate. They cannot read words, yet they can feel them. That is just as dangerous. Words carry a charge. Some burn the air.

There is a book, restricted to only the most disciplined college students, read only under the strictest conditions. It is called The Selective Mutism. Like the condition itself, where a person fully capable of speaking falls into silence. Trauma, perhaps. Or autism. A refusal to speak even when in pain, even when a bone is broken.

The book has no single author. It is the work of a think tank of scientists assembled when our world first turned dire. Their byline is a collective: those who have chosen silence.

I consider this the most important book in existence—more so than The Book of Logic. I was one of the few allowed to read a chapter, under the supervision of six professors, each literally over my shoulder. I was required to read aloud, to prove I was internalizing the knowledge. I tried not to smile, but some words—some meanings—were intoxicating.

The book is no lecture but a dictionary. Dangerous words, catalogued and dissected. Our task as readers: to reclaim them. To invent safer meanings, so they might return to the lexicon. Impossible work, really. These words are thousands of years old, their roots sunk deep into human thought.

The most dangerous: divine. It implies divinity, yes, but also perfection, goodness, purity. Purity leads to holiness. And holy is the deadliest word of all.

I was assigned a word based on my GPA. Just one chapter. My word was wish.

“Wish” is uniquely perilous. Still usable in casual speech, impossible to erase from English. Yet at its root it is prayer—the most poisonous of all practices. A selfish desire wrapped in yearning.

I obsessed over it. The professors explained that even Buddhism was unsafe—not religion, but philosophy. They corrected me: its endless pursuit of transcendence still implies a higher state. And higher states attract the creatures.

They told me survival demands rejection of transcendence. That only the material exists. That survival must be atheist. Survival must be neutral. Survival must simply be.

And yet I still desire. I desire to destroy the word wish. But that riddle has no answer. To kill desire without transcending is impossible. That was the lesson. Not to solve it, but to see it for what it is: the loop, the poison, the trap.

Faith is dangerous. Desire is chemical. Wish is selfish desire. That is the safe reduction.

But on my weakest days, I break the loop. I think of the word. I whisper it in my mind.

I wish I could wish.

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Let me know if want more of the story :3

We are gathered here today to say goodbye to our brother, husband, and father. Dr. Tyrone Tiberius Walker. A brilliant mind taken from us far too early.

That’s how the preacher opened my father’s eulogy.

And he was right. My father was a genius.

He spent his entire life studying DNA. Public forums, conferences, university lectures—you name it, my father had probably been part of it. Any major textbook in the United States worth its weight in paper had some contribution from him buried somewhere inside it. He had taught at Cambridge, Stanford, and Berkeley.

But there was one thing that always held his career back.

His obsession with genetic memory.

My father was a man shaped by his time. Growing up in the sixties, he saw the last dying breaths of segregation. He lived through the remnants of Jim Crow and vividly remembered the Million Man March. I think those things branded themselves into him somehow.

He used to say:

“There’s a fear in a Black man’s heart that cannot be explained on paper.”

I always thought he was talking about socioeconomic pressure, systemic racism, generational trauma. Things like that.

But apparently my father meant something much stranger.

Going through his office after the funeral, I found thousands upon thousands of hours of research dedicated to reincarnation, instinct, and genetic memory. My father believed human beings inherited more than physical traits. He believed we inherited fear itself.

And according to him, African Americans in particular carried specific fears that other groups did not.

Absolute bullshit.

Fear is learned behavior. Fear of heights, ghosts, snakes—sure, maybe there’s some tiny genetic component there, but my father took it to an entirely different level.

After decades of research, he became convinced African Americans consistently reacted to three very specific things.

The first was sound.

My father believed Black Americans could hear a particular pitch that disturbed us in ways other people could not perceive. He called it an “emphasound.”

When I challenged him on this years ago, he completely refused to hear reason. This brilliant man suddenly became impossible to argue with.

Apparently the sound he used during experiments was a heavily distorted hyena cackle pitched upward to almost painful frequencies.

Which made no sense to me.

Hyenas are terrifying animals already. Anybody hearing some shrieking nightmare sound at high pitch would freak the hell out.

The second trigger was color.

Orange.

Yes. Literally orange.

But not just any orange. He specified very particular shades. Burnt orange. Earth tones. Clay colors. Rust-like spectrums.

When I asked him why those colors supposedly frightened African Americans more than anyone else, he never gave me a straight answer.

Then there was the third trigger.

Texture.

My father claimed Black Americans displayed unusual discomfort toward a very specific texture combination:
fur mixed with scales.

I had absolutely no idea where he was getting any of this from.

But now, standing in his office after his funeral, surrounded by decades of obsessive research, I realized the last years of his life had been entirely consumed by this fixation.

One notebook in particular caught my attention.

Across the front page, written in thick black marker, was a single word:

PROOF.

I opened it expecting dementia-fueled rambling. and trust me I was not disappointed, a damn that brought a tear to my eyes. Pages absolutely brimming with discussing color, sound, texture, instinct, and inherited memory.

And then I saw the drawing.

I actually dropped the notebook.

It was some kind of creature. Tall. Massive. Almost Sasquatch-like, but wrong in ways I can’t fully explain. Looking at it made something deep inside me recoil instinctively.

The strangest part wasn’t that it scared me.

It was that it felt familiar.

 then it hit me that my dad  may have shown me this image before and it kindled something from my childhood. cuz it felt too old and too familiar

I flipped through the notebook faster after that and eventually found references to something called the Chicken Hawk Experiment.

Apparently sometime in the forties, a geneticist attempted to prove genetic memory existed. He raised generations of chickens entirely inside an enclosed hangar so they would never see the sky or encounter predators naturally.

Then he tested their reactions.

He flew harmless kite shapes overhead. No response.

Fake eagles. No response.

But when he flew a silhouette resembling a chicken hawk, the chickens panicked instantly.

According to my father, those chickens somehow remembered a predator they had never encountered themselves.

“We are no different than the chickens,” one of his notes read.

“There is something humanity remembers.”

That was when I finally understood.

This was never really about race.

At least not entirely.

My father believed African Americans remembered this thing more strongly because, historically, we had encountered it more often.

That was the true focus of his research.

Memory.

Inherited memory.

I kept reading.

Louisiana sightings.

Virginia sightings.

Vermont sightings.

The words repeated over and over through dozens of notebooks.

Sightings of what?

I finally looked some of it up online.I'm not sure why retrospectively. it'd be to try to prove to myself that my father was on to something to ease the idea that his dementia was eating him up alive. Grief has a strange way of trying to force you to process things, even if what you're processing is insanity. When I went online, I instantly realized I had made a mistake. 

Forums. YouTube videos. Fringe paranormal websites discuss disappearances connected to old slave quarters and isolated Black communities.

Then one name kept appearing repeatedly:

Jeremiah Sequoia.

A plantation owner who allegedly lost fifteen slaves to an unidentified creature sometime during the nineteenth century.

According to the accounts, the creature did not eat people normally.

It drained them.

Specifically, their pigmentation.

Victims were described as pale afterward, as though the color itself had been removed from their skin through some proboscis-like appendage extending from the creature’s mouth.

I almost laughed reading it.

Almost.

Then I noticed something my father had underlined repeatedly throughout the historical documents.

It only targeted darker-skinned victims.

That line had been circled so many times the paper was practically torn through.

Why would that matter?

My father believed melanin itself attracted the creature somehow. According to his theory, lighter-skinned peoples were attacked less frequently because they simply didn’t contain enough of whatever the creature fed on.That's why those in North Asia, and Europe may have not had folklore attached to this kind of creature. the Australia angle started to make a little bit more sense. 

Absolute insanity Had somehow now made patterns in my mind..

My poor father God damn it. 

I could actually track his mental deterioration through the notebooks. Every year the obsession grew worse. Less scientific restraint. More desperation.

A brilliant man slowly feeding his own genius into psychosis.

Then I found another book.

This one focused on Hindu mythology.

My father had always been interested with Eastern philosophy and occult traditions. Several pages were earmarked, all referencing a creature from Indian folklore with an almost identical description.

Again:
dark fur.

Scaled textures.

Burnt orange coloration.

Feeding on darker-skinned populations.

Suddenly the maps on my father’s walls made more sense. He had circled,Places on the planet where historically the population had darker pigmentation and tried to line them up with sightings and the folklore matched. he put the word migration patterns and other undesirable language under it. I noticed that some of the words were misspelled. This is very significant honestly. my father was a stickler for grammar and also the way things were written were not his handwriting. he had a very beautiful handwriting script almost look like something you would find a King's Court. these were barely legible and childlike. I let the tears fall when I saw that I couldn't hold them back anymore. I pressed on trying to understand my own father's illness. The absolute cruelty of dementia had devastated him. whatever glimpse of reality that he had was definitely stolen from him and this creature this remnant of his life this genetic memory held him together. As I looked at the map and notice specific continents in areas were highlighted. 

Uganda Swaziland. populations pigmentations per area.

India, Goya, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh 

The American South.Australia had hundreds of underlines. he was particularly interested in that area. majority of the indigenous population of Australia. why would he focus on Australia? 

It It was ranting it was raving it was disjointed it was dementia. it was my father. at this point I could barely hold it together. I had tears forming at corners of my eyes.I felt the lump of full-on breakdown coming and still I held it together even though my father was not there I felt his judgment even his presence in the room as they held back my emotion.

And yet after hours alone in that office, surrounded by all his notes and theories, I started understanding how a mind could disappear into something like this.

Obsessions give people purpose. It can be grounding, reminded me of my grandmother who completed every sentence in her later years with something she compared to the Bible. She had the same illness. I sat on the floor reminiscing about her rubbing my forehead.I remember her telling me but falling off your bike it's just a part of being a kid She was somehow compared it to Jesus falling three times On his way to be crucified. it was comforting at the time but now I know it was beginning stages of dementia  not Religiosity. Before she had met my  grandfather she was a Deaconess at her church. Makes perfect sense my father got  his devotion from her. and I got my father's love of science. I wonder what my fate will be when I'm old. I got my medical and PHD in sports medicine, . I wonder how kinesiology work through dementia I feel as if this is the Fate of all in my family to have Obsession be the only grounding. Will my sons have the same burdens of me writing down how lactic acid builds up in joints how tendons can bend and break over time. will that be my grounding? will I have notes and discernible nonsense scribbled on the wall? perhaps a question for another day. 

Eventually I found one final Post-it note.

My father’s last written words.

At first glance it looked like a shopping list.

Gun stores.

Rope prices.

Chemical supplies.

Then I flipped the note over.

Skin-whitening products.

Bleaching agents.

Products designed to damage melanin production.

I stared at the list for a long time trying to understand what my father had been planning.

Was he trying to hide from the creature?

Or kill it?

That night I decided to stay in my father’s house alone while cleaning everything out. My wife and sons stayed back home in Virginia. I didn’t want them dragged into this depressing process.

My sister was supposed to arrive in two days, but I planned on being gone before then.

Too many memories in this house already.

I settled into my father’s bed and stared at the ceiling I had stared at a thousand times as a child.

My father used to read to me before bed.

Not children’s books.

Medical journals.

Research papers.

PhD dissertations.

The man refused to let me consume anything he considered scientifically inaccurate.

Which honestly made all this hurt worse.

Dementia is cruel.

My father still owned one of those old jitterbug phones because he could barely understand smartphones near the end. Around midnight the phone buzzed several times from somewhere in the room.

I picked it up.

The messages came from someone named Professor Liu-Chen.

Scrolling upward revealed months of correspondence between him and my father.

Professor Chen was apparently a cryptozoologist from Indiana and some kind of admirer of my father’s work.

Their conversations were difficult to read.

You could literally see my father’s dementia worsening through his spelling mistakes and fragmented thoughts, but Professor Chen kept encouraging him. Feeding into every theory. Asking for dates, sightings, migration patterns.

The final text message from Chen read:

Doctor, you’re correct. There will likely be a sighting in your area based on the demographics you provided.

I frowned at the screen.

Then it clicked.

The neighborhood I grew up in was predominantly African American.

This man genuinely believed the creature hunted there.

I almost threw the phone across the room.

Some cryptozoology lunatic feeding my dying father’s delusions for attention.

Then another message arrived.

An article.

Two missing girls.

Local.

Both Black.

Professor Chen had attached only one sentence beneath the link:

The feeding pattern has started again.

A chill crawled up my spine.

I threw the phone into my father’s closet.

I couldn’t take anymore.

A creature that feeds on melanin.

A fear buried in our genes.

Human beings remembering predators the same way chickens remembered hawks.

I buried my face into the pillow and forced myself to sleep.

I thought about calling my wife, but I was exhausted and too jet-lagged to even figure out what time it was back home.

So instead I lay there in the dark.

And then I felt it.

Fear.

Not ordinary fear.

Recognition.

My whole body broke into sweat instantly. My hands shook so hard I could barely move. Something inside me screamed that I needed to look out the window.

I don’t know why.

But I did.

The yard outside looked empty.

Still, my eyes kept searching desperately for something.

Something I felt like I already knew.

Then I saw it.

A flash of burnt orange moving beneath the window.

I dropped to the floor immediately and crawled beneath my father’s bed like a terrified child.

And I stayed there for hours.

Too afraid to move.

Eventually exhaustion overtook panic.

When I finally crawled back out, pale morning sunlight filled the room.

5:00 AM.

Nothing outside. Of course there was nothing there, there never was anything. Just somebody who, damn, there had a panic attack because their father died and just spent half the night reading and watching cryptozoology bullshit online. I rubbed my face, I'm set back down on the bed holding my face. And then it came, love hurt that I was trying to avoid. It came well into the surface. I cried genuinely, let everything go. I had a howl in my voice that I did not know existed. At his funeral I kept it together but here alone in his house, I was a scared little boy all over again missing my daddy. There were so many thoughts racing through my mind. I'm so glad my sons aren't here to see me like this. I'm so glad my wife isn't here to have he howling searching for answers that don't exist. I'm so glad my big sister is not here to hold me. I had to feel this by myself, my ego, my masculinity, my soul had to handle this on its own. As quickly as the hurt came, it rose from my body. I felt like I just vomited. But it was a good feeling. It was authentic, real, true hurt, grief that actually has weight to the body. It left me like a curse, and still wet from my own tears. I rose to my feet, the room no longer had my father's presence. My father had died long ago; dementia had taken him before his body deteriorated. I took a deep breath and wanted once again to clean out the garbage that had been cluttering his mind. I stood slowly and approached the window and saw nothing, confirming my and get with my soul, confirming that I was just playing into my own grief. Then I noticed something on the windowsill. A dried seed pod? I stared at it; it appeared to have a piece of snake skin attached to it. I wanted to open the window and touch it. But something bigger inside me told me to let it be.

,

I’ve had schizophrenia since I was fourteen years old. Devastating diagnosis. For the most part though, I’ve got a pretty good handle on it. I can hold a job, keep friends, pay bills, all the bells and whistles of life. But unfortunately, no matter what medication I take, I’m still riddled with hallucinations.

Because of my medication, I’m able to tell when I hear “radio people.” Pretty common symptom. Hearing instructions or criticisms about yourself coming from random sources like a toaster, the TV, a… duh… radio, whatever. I’m usually able to distinguish that it’s just psychological noise.

Whenever I hear stuff, it’s mostly just my name being screamed.

“SCOTT!”

Always at the top of its lungs. The voice changes sometimes, but it’s always screaming my name. Nothing too interesting. I don’t get the fun schizophrenia where you think you have a direct path to God or you’re being ordered to kill somebody Hollywood-style. I just get random gobbledygook.

The most common thing is hearing my name or instructions about family members that are weirdly mundane. Kind of hard to explain unless you experience it yourself. Like imagine you haven’t talked to your brother in two weeks. It’s sitting in the back of your mind that you should probably call him, but you’ve been busy. Well, the way my schizophrenia works is I’ll be watching TV and suddenly that random thought starts coming out of the television.

“You need to call your brother Brian right away.”

And it’ll repeat that for two straight hours.

It’s unbelievably annoying.

Sometimes if I call or text the person, the voices quiet down. Unfortunately then it’ll tell me to text my brother three hundred times, and to ease my own pain I’ve actually done it before.

Sorry, Brian.

But now, because of the medication, I’m mostly able to distinguish it from reality and ride out the storm when I have a bad episode. Some people deal with that stuff for months at a time. I guess I’m kind of lucky with the timeline.

I also have visual hallucinations. Usually people outside my window trying to break in.

I hate those ones.

Because sometimes I’ll get the one-two punch where the auditory hallucinations stack on top of the visual ones and I’ll end up calling the police in a panic. At a certain point I don’t care if I know it’s fake or not. When your brain is screaming that somebody’s outside your house, logic kind of goes out the window.

After one of these bouts, my mom had the brilliant idea of getting me a service dog, which honestly became my lifeline. I didn’t even know service dogs for schizophrenics existed until recently. Apparently they’re trained to recognize distress and episodes.

My boy Bruno can tell when something’s wrong with me before I even know it sometimes.

There was one time my schizophrenia had me convinced the clouds were somehow surveilling me. Like the government was using them to track me down. Bruno grounded me and pulled me out of it before I completely spiraled. He understood I was sick before I did.

It feels so much better knowing if my brain decides to fuck me over, Bruno is there to pull me back into the real world.

But there is one flaw with my boy.

He bails on me whenever I experience “Mr. Brown.”

And oh boy, Mr. Brown is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.

I can only describe him as an entity. He’s about six feet tall, extremely thin, almost skeletal. His body looks like it’s made out of runny clay. The color is weird too. Kind of orange like a terracotta pot, but mixed with this brown, fecal-looking color underneath.

And he smells damp. Like rainwater. Wet dirt. Basement mildew.

He is all my symptoms rolled into nightmare fuel.

Out of everything schizophrenia has thrown at me over the years, Mr. Brown is without question the most terrifying.

His face is mostly exposed skull. Almost clean bone with no eyes, barely any skin. But around his jaw there’s just enough flesh stretched over it that it still looks capable of talking.

And he’s always muttering.

I can never understand what he’s saying.

He hobbles when he walks, shaking violently like somebody with Parkinson’s disease. Slow. Elderly. Every movement looks painful. And whenever he points at me, pieces of clay fall off his fingers onto the floor.

Mr. Brown hallucinations are always the worst ones. Usually he just appears randomly for no reason at all. He’s hard to deal with because he’s just pure brain noise. He can come without any outside stress or trigger. He’s just a product of my mind’s idleness.

One time I was sitting in my kitchen eating a bologna sandwich and chips. Completely normal day. No drinking. No drugs besides my medication.

And there he was.

He hobbled into the kitchen from the hallway.

I remember just freezing there, staring at him while holding my sandwich. He pointed at me with that trembling finger, muttering under his breath while clay dripped onto the tile floor.

Then just as quickly as he appeared, he turned and hobbled back into the darkness of my house.

Of course, I chased after him immediately, trying to see where he went. Even though I know he isn’t real.

Nothing.

Never anything.

But the weirdest thing about Mr. Brown is Bruno.

Whenever Mr. Brown appears, Bruno is never around.

Or maybe I just can’t focus on him. I honestly don’t know which possibility scares me more.

Every other hallucination I’ve ever had, Bruno reacts somehow. He grounds me. He calms me down. But when Mr. Brown shows up, it’s like Bruno just stops existing.

I explained all this to my psychiatrist, who mostly just adjusted my medication again. That’s the frustrating thing about psychiatrists. They’re not really therapists. They listen, scribble notes, throw pills at you, and send you on your way. If you want actual therapy you need a cognitive therapist, and it’s surprisingly hard finding one who deals with schizophrenia at my level.

Still, I’m lucky overall.

I work remotely for a video-sharing company. Mostly screening videos for porn, violence, glitches, stuff like that. Pretty easy work.

On the side I also do tattoo work.

One cool thing about schizophrenia is it definitely opens your brain up creatively. I’m currently apprenticing under this woman named Melissa. She owns a tattoo shop with a couple other artists. Really talented.

She’s also one of the few people who actually knows I’m schizophrenic.

I described Mr. Brown to her once and she drew him for me.

Honestly?

The drawing freaked me the fuck out.

“Mr. Brown sounds horrifying,” she told me.

Which, yeah. He is.

And out of all the things I’ve ever seen, Mr. Brown always sticks out the most. He’s always there in the corners of rooms, standing in dark hallways, barely visible in the cracks of the house.

One thing I told Melissa that really bothered me was how Bruno never reacted to him.

Her eyes narrowed at that.

“That’s really weird,” she said. “Bruno’s such a good dog. I can’t believe he doesn’t respond when you see him.”

“He doesn’t react to anything involving Mr. Brown,” I told her. “Or maybe I just can’t focus on him when it happens.”

“How often do you see him?”

Funny thing is, I could never answer that question.

Mr. Brown comes when he wants to.

Leaves when he wants to.

Always pointing.

Always muttering.

Then drifting back into the shadows.

Over the last six months, me and Melissa got really close. Nothing romantic exactly, but definitely more than friendship. We never slept together or anything like that. She’d just gotten out of a six-year relationship, and honestly I’ve never really pursued relationships much anyway.

I’m kind of asexual by circumstance.

Not that I hate sex. Schizophrenia just complicates life enough already, and the medication absolutely murders your libido.

So me and Melissa exist in this weird gray area where we’re not dating, not friends-with-benefits, not really anything definable.

Just two adults who need company.

She comes over a lot now. She’s seen me during episodes before. Definitely freaked her out once or twice, but she never walked away from it. She actually researched schizophrenia and learned what to say when someone’s having an episode.

“Are you safe right now?”

“Do you know I’m here with you?”

Stuff like that.

Nobody’s ever cared enough to do research for me before.

And honestly? Ever since she started spending more time around me, Mr. Brown started showing up less.

Maybe Mr. Brown is loneliness or something.

Maybe having another person around weakens him.

One night we were sitting on my couch watching old episodes of Star Trek. The William Shatner ones. Laughing at all the terrible monster-of-the-week episodes.

And then Mr. Brown showed up for the first time in weeks.

I froze, staring into the hallway.

“There he is,” I whispered.

“There’s who?”

“Mr. Brown.”

Melissa followed where I was pointing.

And then she stopped breathing for a second.

Her eyes locked onto the hallway.

Slowly she stood up.

“Hey Scott,” she said carefully. “Come outside with me for a minute.”

“What?”

“I wanna smoke a cigarette.”

“So go smoke. Why do you need me?”

Melissa was looking around. I couldn’t follow her eyes. I saw her purse her lips together like she was going to whistle for my dog, but she gave up almost immediately. She cleared her throat a little and tilted her head, searching for Bruno.

Her eyes got wide.

She found him.

“Scott.” Her voice tightened. “Come on. Come with me. I don’t want to be outside alone.”

She grabbed my wrist.

Hard.

And the entire time she kept glancing behind me toward the hallway. I did the same, but I was looking at Mr. Brown. I don’t know what she was looking at.

She practically dragged me outside and shoved me into her car before peeling out of my driveway so fast I thought we were gonna hit somebody.

“Melissa, what the fuck are you doing?!”

She didn’t answer.

She just kept driving.

Way too fast.

Finally she pulled into a Target parking lot about fifteen minutes away and threw the car into park. She sat there breathing hard, staring straight ahead.

“What the fuck is going on?” I asked.

Finally she turned and looked at me.

There was a long silence between us, and it kind of hit me.

She saw my schizophrenia unfiltered.

Did I say something else I wasn’t aware of? It’s possible. I was ready to apologize or explain that sometimes I have no control over it. I had a whole speech lined up for when this day eventually happened.

Before I could say anything though, I noticed how pale her face was.

Whatever I built with her it’s over now.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I know my visions can be overwhelming to people.”

There were tears welling up in my eyes. Whatever I thought I could make with another human being, even unconsciously, was gone.

Melissa slowly turned toward me with wide eyes.

Ironically, she said my name as loudly as one of my hallucinations.

“Scott.”

I just looked at her, expecting a lecture.

But what came out of her mouth next is something I still can’t wrap my mind around.

“I can see Mr. Brown too.”

,