Some days, I don’t even get out of bed.

The hole in the wall is temptation. Brain wakes up, kills body. I can feel the cylinders starting ever before I’m of sound mind enough to flex the muscle that massages the thalmus and releases the chemicals that knock me back out. By this time, I have probably slept for about sixteen hours.

I have been here before, right before the second wind. Two more hours and I could have slept for another eight, easily. The old me, the trusting me, is awake and goddammit it’ll take hours to switch it over. Seriously, you failure, what kind of animal are you? What kind of cliché are you?

Can’t sleep long enough. Can’t stay asleep. I drag myself out of bed and travel across Knothole to Rotor’s workshop, using the rear entrance, sunlight kicking my ass. This is the easy part. The disinterest is no act.

Rotor’s part of Knothole took an entire year to turn into a junkyard, scouring the Great Forest for extra parts, units blown apart by the rebels during the coup fifteen years ago. All the proof that exists is here, evidence of an aftermath, nonspecific testimony from entirely questionable sources. Hooray for Rotor’s workshop.

I don’t stop working for at least seven hours, time dragging very slowly with every iron rod I manage to wrestle into the compressor. Each rod has four plastic guides to keep it straight. I have the routine refined to breaking one guide per minute, making around seven minutes per rod, allowing for time to move each one over to the pile with the rest. Then it’s back to the other side of the yard, wrestling another one out and transporting it over my shoulder to the machine.

Conveniently, the rod-breaking machine drowns out every noise with a single press of a button. Voices from beyond the scrap fence, footsteps, and the nearby sputtering and coughing with loud gulps for air. Two metal plates press together, a loud crunch that signals a guide breaking and I take my thumb off the remote. The noise dies. Once again I can hear Knothole and the vital piece of machinery that keeps everyone alive: the bubble generator.

It’s a clunky thing that wheezes and puffs out blackened smoke. Rotor keeps me out of reach but not out of sight. I can see how worn down and rusty it is, churning out just enough energy to keep the radiation at bay and to make the sky look pretty and blue and filled with clouds, instead of… whatever it really looks like.

Turns out I am made for repetitive action. Working in the junkyard is easy because there is no punch-line in sight. I can concentrate because of the privacy the yard provides. I’m surrounded by a blueprint of the perfect word that they intend for us to build, by reminders that I missed all the fun.

The work will never end.

I leave in the afternoon, no words to Rotor who has learned to deal with my lack of communication by calling after me with a snide remark.

No attempt is made to teach me anything new. Initiative must be in my court.

Lunch is in session when I walk across the square to the only bridge leading into the forest. All kids, one year-olds from the coup who have now grown into their teens, cynical and militant. Former friends of mine. Stressers of keeping everything alive and moving. We are, after all, the planet’s last hope.

I don’t join them anymore. I have gotten good at memorizing the way into the forest by heart so I never have to look up and accidentally make eye contact with somebody else. Fear and weakness. Sometimes I fuck this all up, altering the course to swing closer to Sal’s house and more often than not, glancing at the windows.

Seeing if she’ll come out and tell me some more stories.

Get me to listen to someone, for once.

Fix my fucking problems like she fixed it so everyone could survive.

All of Knothole is Sal. She raises this village from the ground, getting them, all of them, to build this entirely functional society with an economy and a working sewage system and a way to harvest crops without killing the soil every year. A way to work without natural sunlight. Keep the raw sewage flowing far into the village. Building wooden tables to have dinner outside. Giving everyone a job that, in some small way, contributes to the survival of the whole. And then she disappears.

They even have pregnancy planned to where kids will be born right as it is safe to turn off the bubble generator, in fifty years, when we’re all weak senior citizens unfit for parenting.

Who am I to fuck all of that up with a single look?

I make it to the forest, past Sal’s house, successfully quiet, and I remain there until sunset, heading out in one direction as far my nerves allow me. I don’t make it out any further into the woods this time, stopping just short of my bare footprint in the mud from the previous day.

Imagination gets the better of me, every time. Sal said the bubble splits organic matter open, right down to the bone, upon contact. Static flash, ignition, mitochondrial explosions, blastoff to escape velocity and I’d be out of here leaving behind the smell of burning fat and some misplaced feelings of regret.

Today is a day to climb.

I end up below the canopy. Like walking in the woods, I can only go so far.

“By choice.”

Hmm.

Fear, not imagination. Imagination pulls me towards the light, every other day, to the outside world. It isn’t to work or keep sane. Insanity is extreme restraint at the cost of what is deemed unnecessary.

And I could easily patch that fucker up, the hole in my wall, if not for my own stubbornness. I probably wouldn’t wake up at all, but I’d eventually come out into the light thinking I had found the cure. I would stop pushing the cart and it would roll downhill and I’d be back where I started, all social and allowing the infection to grow again.

With the hole, there is physical temptation, and therefore, it is much easier to work against. I know what I’m in for.

One of the teenagers from Knothole is walking up to the base of the tree. Pure luck that he found me this far in the woods. He calls something up that I can’t hear. A question.

If I can’t handle the narrow world I live in now, how will I survive the larger one that we will build?

I can’t stay inside forever. I’m still relying on them for the protection from radiation, the food I eat, even the false sense of superiority that accompanies the isolation. I was provided with this home by Sal. They are doing me a favor by letting me do this to myself. If no reliance is the goal, I have to leave.

Even Rotor, who I consider entirely useless to me, is probably keeping the protests down by lying to those former friends of mine and telling them that I’m part of an important job. No, this is all started because of spite, let’s not forget. They notice you even more when they try to ignore you.

Therein lies the difficulty. I have to find a way to live in the forest in the same soft, safe little hovel and do it in a way that kills no plants, animals, or creatures. By that time, I wonder if you could even call it survival.

… I would have to find the fortitude to keep walking.

The bubble shows a blue sky and fluffy white clouds. It would be the same the entire circumference. There’s no way I could miss a wall of goddamn clouds. I still stop short, every single day.

Sal… she fixes everything and vanishes, deep into her hut and refuses visitors, no longer speaks to anyone.

I haven’t seen her in five years.

This means that my isolation is less out of spite and more by way of example. Good. This is good to remember. It will keep the ego under control. You’re not inventing anything. You’re using your memory to construct a monster using tools used many times by others, creating something that is hopefully deceptively unrecognizable. Days spent going into Rotor’s library and reading. Learning about brain disorders. Dementia. Tumors. Chemical imbalances. Schizophrenia. How many symptoms apply to me.

No normal person would put themselves through this.

But if Sal can do it without even trying… I can do it with practice.

I can see the better days behind the bubble generator, how everyone keeps it out of sight and out of mind, enough so that when they do think about it, they tell themselves that it will last a bit longer, just a bit longer before it finally breaks down. Fifty years is a long shot. I know they look at me and they think the same thing.

Such a strong shield powered by such a weak machine, I’d be surprised if Sal had been lying about the splitting skin thing.

Supposedly Rotor trusts me, regardless of the long list of very good reasons that I should be kept very far away from a paper-thin barrier to the radiation. One small stab to the center is all it would take.

Further circumstantial evidence suggested the existence of betrayal, a massive conspiracy meant to deceive- come on, give me an excuse, please give me an excuse! There HAS TO HAS TO has to be a concrete reason I am acting this way.

I just ignore the kid below me, not even looking at him, not even putting together what the question is. More petty and irrational behavior. He’ll go away soon.

A warning light is the concern switch. If it didn’t turn on, I would think that everything is running fine, in spite of obvious evidence of poor performance. All I can see is the warning light. Pesky fucking thing.

Rotor claims that he talks to Sal. Says she looks tired. Much older. I don’t believe him. What I believe is that he is trying to pick up the torch and continue where she left off. But nothing washes off. My hands remain unclean. Concepts, wearing an illusion of realism. My warning light keeps flashing.

Anything is possible as long as the avenues are slick and the blood keeps moving.

No, not here, where the sky is literally the limit.

Not when something circular and non-threatening comes along.

Not when there’s the possibility of fornication, a rare connection, or a chance to die married to the only logical step outside of your own brain. Feel the cognition, the coordination disappear. But having you would require a lowering of standards on your part, wouldn’t it?

I already had Sal’s role filled by the time Rotor tried to step in.

The base of the tree is clear, now. He’s long gone.

His question… could have been about our mutual friend…former mutual friend…

Still trying to forget her name. Afterwards, we can work on forgetting the rest.

I’m no longer who you want after you admit that you want me, woman. The time to work hard for your approval is over and now you get the real me, all eventual sagging skin and poor eyesight, white hair and weak bowels, all flaws visible to surface detection. Deserving of your resent and hatred because I should have shown that side to you in the first place. I can see it now, even though I’m sitting in this fucking tree below the canopy and taking another avenue out of here, I’m choosing the temporary solution and remembering you in your bed, after the decision to stay the fuck away from you, and that look on your face that knows I can’t get rid of your image, seeing no alternative other than jacking off to the idea that I’m sleeping next to you, sharing the very air that you breathe. Sometimes I put a hand out in front of my dick to catch the cum, sometimes I don’t. You aren’t an idiot. You know I do this. I cum on your sheets and they’re clean the next time I visit. Less than making myself feel better, I am testing the seriousness of your end of the bargain. You never wake up, you never protest. Sometimes I can see you smile when I do it, as I do it, as it ends, when I leave. That is the most I ever get out of you. A smile that says “I might like you for the work that you do; I will hate you for how uncomfortable you make me.” It could be a cringe for all I know.

You reversed years of therapy made possible by self loathing.

Averting the eyes isn’t enough to flush you out of my head. You’re more of a pull than Sal’s hut, more than the mother figure because you’re the wife figure. Also, it helps that I had all the time in the world to transform a crush into an obsession that simply won’t let go, immune to those nasty looks I get from you and your friends. No matter how much you tell me that I’m not your type and try to let me down gently. No matter how long I hide in my stupid hut.

My hands… these had been wrapped around my dick, then furiously rubbing against each other in the lake by the waterfall. Trying to get the smell off. And I was thinking back to when it was perfect and when I had her warm flesh around me instead of these cold, calloused palms of mine. Back when it was perfect. Back when it was perfect. This moment is where I noticed Sonic, a glowing light a short distance into the woods.

What is it about honesty that is such a turnoff? Tell me, are you ashamed of yourself when you remember it?

It’s dark when I climb back down from the tree, all according to the plan. I head back home.

Now is when I visit dreamland.

I play a familiar one…

…

In dreamland, there are scars on her back from when I pulled off her wings.

Aerodynamics, the way you’re so positive that the air is warming just above the bottom draft, even if it only feels warmer where there is less wind. SRY genes shoved our genders apart. We more alike than we’d like to admit aloud but we’re on different cycles, emotions stopping on different points in time, misunderstandings abound but we’re closer than most others.

For instance, you anticipated this forced entry.

This time, instead of remaining asleep, you sit up in bed and catch me with my pants down, internal pundendal artery already supplying blood to my penis. One testicle hanging lower than the other because of a mismatched vascular structure. You don’t laugh or shy away. You take it in stride. You move your blankets out of the way and spread your legs.

Your cleft awaits below the mons veneris. Even with the smaller artery, it’s doing a good job of filling with blood. I’m fully erect now and squinting in the dark to see if your clitoral hood protrudes and hangs, trying to be nonchalant about it. It would take a long time to work up the courage to ask you otherwise. Per instincts, I keep my huge fucking mouth shut.

I crawl onto your bed. You pull me close and our saliva eagerly mingles. I can see the genius in the design. Teeth are bone, but we need the gums for the inevitable damage to the orifice, in order to keep it minimal. God that’s a weird thought, shut the fuck up. I work hard on both the movement of my hands and my tongue, blanking on imagining the muscles on your back rippling under your skin and hair. Your legs wrap around my waist but penetration has not occurred, not yet. I’m erect and pressing against the back of one of your legs, so that’s covered.

My left and right hands mimic the same movement: balling to fists, slightly opening the index and middle fingers and slipping each nipple into both, closing in on them and massaging them with my thumbs. I don’t know how long I do this before our mouths part and your head hits my shoulder. A moan escapes you and I bite down on my lower lip to keep from ejaculating right there, right away. Showstopper time.

By now my scrotum has contracted and melded with the penis into one practical phallus. Your right leg lifts and allows a hand to bend it back, slightly uncomfortable. The glans penis hits a patch of soft damp flesh, the clitoral hood, and tries in vain to push inward, compressing the corpus spongiosum. You lean forward, planting a light kiss on my lips and gripping the base of the pendent and guiding the rest of it on target, into the vaginal opening. It slides past labia minora a bit roughly, forcing open the hymen and massaging the urethral sponge. A gasp escapes you. You feel that? Does your genitofemoral nerve feel that? Is the spinal column relaying the fucking message?

No way to know what shape it was now. Both hands are back up, around my neck. You can’t get me any closer. It doesn’t stop you from trying. Soft fur presses against my chest, erect and goring my ribs. It is not clear how it’s supposed to start, in terms of intensity, frequency. I start slow. It’s difficult at the offset. Not much movement in or out. My lips press against yours. My mouth opens. You lift your head up and do most of the work while I keep my back moving. … Have to keep the rhythm consistent…

I want all of you but I don’t have enough hands, limbs, nerve endings to accomplish it. I have to settle for bracing myself above you and picking up speed while you press your teeth into my neck and expel hot air. Infrequently, my eyes open, like a reverse blink. I can’t seem to catch yours. Just gimme a glimpse, just one.

Skin around my dick compress into folds with every thrust, morphing the appearance of the cavernosal artery mixing with signals received from superficial muscles. The cremaster muscles and dartos have finally given out and my scrotum smacks loosely against your perineum, stray hairs catching most of the wax dripping from the greater vestibular glands. My hips are tired. I’m using my legs to push further into you. My fingers dig into the sheets, your thighs putting considerable pressure on my arms. Sweat forms on my forehead as I lean in close and run my tongue along the mammary papilla on your right tit, and here is where I feel it… ischiocavernous muscles clenched, the urethra forcibly lubricated, getting ready for the toss, the spermatozoa rush. Your hands claw into my neck, bulbocavernous muscles forcing your labia tighter around my dick like you can feel it coming too, forcing more lubrication outwards.

The epididymus is excited, for all of its hard work is about to pay off. My asshole tightens, my back arches, one final violent shove…

A plateau of euphoria. Prostate unflinchingly dishing out all it can. Seminal vesicles doing their part. Sperm flows out of the urinary meatus. Your naked eyes, finally, when I don’t want them. You believe for one brief second that I am seeing something beautiful and overwhelming. Really, the chemical buildup is so intense that it’s blinding. I’m seeing nothing beyond my own pleasure. Nothing matters, not even you. I don’t know why you take it so personally. I don’t know why I do.

Your cervix convulses and dilates, and long story short, we end up having children.

But here in the refractory period I cannot see the responsibilities or the consequences. The sex is really an excuse to get back in. I can’t tell if you orgasm or not. You look happy enough in dreamland.

Do you think that real life will be that great? Or will it just be horrible? If this were to really happen, I’d be too afraid to move, let alone make a decision. I love you way too much to fuck you.

And both of us have realized that you’d have to lower your standards in order to love me.

Dreamland is hostile.

You stupid fucking shit. I told you it was going to get harder. What did you think, that the world would take one look at your worthless, crybaby self and lovingly accept you for who you are? Never. It was never going to do that. It was a lapse of reason. If you can’t stop thinking about it then you’re more gullible than I ever imagined. You can’t pretend to be happy. The lies can’t keep you going. You can’t ever show any sign of weakness. I told you this time and time again, and now look what you’re doing. You’re killing yourself because the world won’t let you stick it in. It doesn’t want you. Deal with it. You aren’t lucky. You won’t ever be lucky. You won’t ever get what you want. You have to work for it. Work for it, you dumb bastard. That’s what upsets you. After all that denial, the truth comes out. Caught red handed. I wanted her pussy.

Disgusting is what it is. These used to be nonspecific fantasies that grew more and more detailed as time wore on. I liked the fantasies a lot better when all we did was kiss, and now there’s this shit about balls slapping against you and anuses clenching and suppressing the urge to fart and I’m sure you’d never want that amount of detail from anyone, least of all me.

Inside, you are warm. My God, you are so warm.

This is why I left. Well, am leaving. Weaning myself off of you.

Right now, therapy is waiting for you to fall asleep so I can masturbate to your sleeping form. Sex or no sex, there’s still a mess that has to be cleaned up.

All of this drama makes me sick, and what sickens me more is that this shit is common. Every one of us has the exact same shelf of emotions, myself included, and we all just… pick out what we want to cook our brains in, and we make up excuses for them. Blame it on the stars. Blame it on karma. Blame it on somebody else. If we’re this volatile, this unreliable, why count on anyone in the first place? Why take that risk?

But I don’t want to leave. The rest of them pale in comparison; you’re the only one I want to be inside of, forever, and I’ll never know why you’re the only one that works.

I haven’t masturbated in her hut or returned to that spot in the woods in over two weeks, convenient excuse being that it’s another self-imposed restraining device. “If I can do this, I can do anything.” Sometimes I confuse it with freedom.

These are two sides of the same piece of shit that I’m dealing with, here. Typical behavior is settling for someone other than her, anything to pass off the genes and propagate a dying planet. Typical behavior is also following in Sonic’s footsteps, keeping everyone at a distance and training, training, training for the inevitable time to protect them from any danger, which is what Rotor and Sal wanted from me. That is why I can’t let her go. They had to have told her to stay away from me, not give into instincts or advances. Feel no pity. “Give Tails looks like he’s disgusting and will never amount to shit.” It’s their fault this is hap-

Now, now.

It’s stupid, so fucking stupid the way we kill ourselves over the little things. I can’t do this, I can’t do that, she doesn’t like me enough to fuck me. Who gives a shit? I’m supposed to prove my own to worth, okay, to myself. How do I do that? Impress the very people I hate? Make their lives easier by my making my own life a living hell, an unending battle for their right to live? That’s what’s lasting? So I have a good fifty-year run. That’s all well and good for me, but what about the rest of the world? I want to make a lasting impression, one that will make the stars envious.

Not fill another role. Not pick up where someone else left off.

…

The exit to dreamland presents itself right on time, when I’m behind closed doors.

All of this research, and I still want to fuck her. That’s the problem. It won’t quit.

Home. I’m taking brief mental notes of my supplies. My water will last another week. Almost out of food. I don’t need to look at my desk to know how low I am on paper and ink.

Embarrassment is what I am avoiding. Those words I said to Sonic, they didn’t come from me. They came from someone completely married to the idea that we, all of us, can get along if we’d only work past our own issues and learn to trust one another, give in to faith and charity and all that. Basically, everything that Sonic stood for. Basically, so not me.

It’s even worse. I said things to him that are entirely illogical, that make no sense when under careful inspection. Sonic asked me if I kept up my training, and the immediate response: I haven’t. Of fucking course I haven’t. Sal and Rotor did put some emphasis on keeping me fit, but I stopped taking it seriously some years ago. I wasn’t even one year-old when Sonic died, so how the hell would he know about the training unless he came to Knothole and watched? There’s that, and my lack of hesitation in delivering the answer. No. “Whoops, I haven’t. Sorry, Ghost-Sonic, but I have apparently been thinking about what you’d think of me this entire time. I’m an asshole.”

And there are some memories of him, some I have always had, but ones that he drew up weren’t mine. They were images of legends that have been told to me throughout my life, mostly by Sal before she went hermit. Rotor mentions him once or twice but with less confidence, with less storytelling flourish. Like he didn’t know him as well.

His age. Sonic looks about as old as Rotor, a couple of years older than me, but died at a time when he was about three or four years of age. So, unless ghosts can age, there is something extremely fishy going on here.

… Okay, so I liked talking to Sonic. It was different. Everything he said sounded honest. On some level, I did like the person I became when I opened my mouth. It was easy, and I missed it.

Besides, he’s a ghost.

He can’t hurt me.

I sit down at my desk and I allow one sentence to summarize the day, or what I want to do tomorrow. Or how I’m feeling.

One sentence should be enough. I can’t spill my thoughts and call it good. Even therapeutic.

Funny. I’ll be talking to someone who has been dead for a very long time. Slightly confusing. Do I worship someone I hardly knew? He’s still a symbol, at least. A representation of a real person that nobody ever really knew. Except for Sal, maybe.

I will go back to him. Don’t worry.

I crawl my way out of a box to find myself in another box, and the words don’t do it justice. There are different masks wearing different makeup and the charade is amusing but it’s the same rotting flesh underneath. Shame, for every single thing that I do, because none of it is good enough for her.

I will go back to you, Sonic. I’ll use you to get over problems that you have nothing to do with.

… I’m very tired.

A return to the void beckons. I swim into her. Fluids heat me up until I feel like I’m floating. I wrap her flesh tightly around me, and I stay there.