The balloons have had enough of me and my parties. Their pity is gone, replaced with fury, and they begin to bob up against me on purpose. I don’t like the attitude, so I slip on my brass needles. Now they back off. Helium makes real cowards. I examine my rib cage. The contents are a box of instant photos in an old violin decaying in the rain. Have I really been a ghost this long? Is that why no one but Desire comes to my parties?
Day: February 13, 2026
Futuristic Hellscape
Maroon rain terrifies the uninitiated in this futuristic hellscape of IRS and FBI and all the other 3 letter agencies of death and moral decay. The cyborgs hunt bunnies with lures of love, the sweet taste of carrots a distant memory. In the old city, remnants of humanity hawk their human wares. Behind me a lurid green ghost of electronic regret follows me everywhere, learning from my failures and noting them on a loudspeaker. Every time it calls one out, (numbered in the hundreds of thousands now) predatory basalt crows dive down and peck at me like philosophers of old.
The Nautilus Shape of My Indigo Heart
The nautilus shape of my indigo heart contains chamber after chamber of glowing ghosts, their scents trailing them like smoke. Ghosts of grace and hope. Grace swims like a flounder always away from me. Hope smokes hookah in a stained muumuu on the carousing beaches of my mediocre 30s. Some chambers grow roses, their red piercing my blueness, retrieving my innermost data from servers I sank in the ocean of omnivorous octopi. But the central chamber, perfect in its tiny finite nature, is the ozone of my being named Stony Place.
Miniature Moon 