Keegan Swenson

An Army of Horseman

It was obvious to Napoleon that this day was to be like any other day, as he woke up with a feeling deep in his gut that he was alone—his mangled body curled into a capital C around a silk body pillow—and this feeling, without question, had the potential to follow him all day, reducing every interaction with another to a solipsistic reflection of his own aloneness. Luckily, coffee. By the time he got his cup of black coffee, he’d usually managed to dull this feeling into submission so he could go to his office and say hi to Claire at the front desk with a half-smile and sit at his workstation with an ergonomic office chair, pretending to be lost in a flurry of deep thinking when all he really did was work for ninety minutes a given day and fill the rest of the time with his favorite internet subculture: otherkin. This subset of people believed they were not human but in fact ethereal beings—usually vampires or ghosts.