Neverchangeable | Chapter 0

I smile up at the camera. A past version of me, a ghost version, sits hunched over a laptop in a dark room and watches the grainy, bluelight images move across his screen. I picture being that other version of me right now, the one that doesn’t exist, staring blankly, hungrily at the scene. Finally, I hear him think, something different. He hasn’t realized it’s us yet – me, him – and so he laps up the image. Two slumped over figures, one barely human anymore, the other a black-and-white night vision phantom of a man, smiling at the camera. His one eye glows, a white ring of two-dimensional fire that burns into the lens. The other eye is a wet slit, open, gooey, dripping, the membrane now a soft, stretched sock drooping over the eyelid, the kind of sock Farley and I used to hit each other with, with tennis balls dropped down in to the toes, the kind you used to hate. I shudder, look sideways with my one eye at the barely human figure slumped beside me, at once the man in the night vision scene again. You would not have approved of this. Not one bit. I look back at the camera, attached to the nose of the moose Farley had killed when we were fourteen, the camera I put up after Dad died. You would have been mortified. Would have called me indecent. I would have told you, it’s called being smart. You and I both know, you would have seen through that.

From the cabin floor, I open my mouth, the taste of blood and mucus and human jelly sit like sweat on my upper lip, like the pubic hair beginnings of a pre-pubescent moustache, like milk and cookie crumbs stuck to my face after school with you and Farley at the kitchen table. You’re still here with me, and so is the kitchen table, although the cabin isn’t quite what it used to be. Your yellow skin falls off the delicate high bone of your cheek as if to say, Explain yourself, young man.

So I look up at the camera and I do.

> Click to read Chapter 1