Today, I celebrate eating the same three meals, every day, for roughly the length of a year. Some precise part of my brain wishes I knew the exact date I began. That's a telling preview of what awaits us further down in this bizarre story.

Listen, a grieving mind and body does some stuff that might appear strange upon first glance. It's a matter of self-preservation. It's a need to keep my whole meat-stack from collapsing into a lopsided, catatonic blob on the floor for the world to step over, around, or through. Just, street-mush. I needed to be in control of something when it seemed the heat-death of the universe was the only certainty in not only my life, but in all existence.

Then again, most people aren't the closing act on a list of eulogizers at age 32. Anecdotal research tells us only 0.2% of people dying these days die in their 30s. Think on that, as I recall the experience exacto-carving some stuff across my pinkest parts with a tenacity usually reserved for a teenager defacing a bathroom stall at a hardcore club. But, hey, that's a story for another time, and today's lesson is about my continued need for food to live. Otherwise I would die, and then where would we be?

Now that we have a morsel of context, maybe I should explain.

CHAPTER I — THE INCAN SPHERE AND THE BLACK GLASS BISHOP

ONE | Bad Breeding

Ridley Woodward had hidden five deadly weapons around the cabin. Astrid was looking straight at one of them.

“I think I love you,” Astrid said, turning on her heel to face him. Her back was to the mantle now. The elephant gun was snuggled down into its rest above the fireplace. Hardly hidden at all.

Nevertheless, as determined to follow in her father’s footsteps as Astrid was—the old man had cursed the Kaiser with his dying breath—Ridley had never seen the woman take the gun down from above the fireplace. It had begun gathering spiderwebs. Hadn’t it? Ridley had taken caution to mimic the spiders’ architecture after silently loading the gun the night before.

Caught off guard by Astrid’s words though, he could not find himself. There was a tickle in his throat and lump in his chest. He perspired under the afternoon sun. It rolled in the window in a fiery hymn.

His disobedient eyes moved off her after she spoke, the words hardly finished.

FIVE | Held Close

It took some effort for Theresa to brush away the roots hugging the casket.

Operating on instinct, Niall kept his head swiveling on his neck, as though houskeeping, or police, or ghosts might come around a corner and inquire with harsh language.

A wooden crunch brought him back. Theresa wrenched open the lid. Inside was Arthur Remington’s decayed body, stiff as a movie prop. Numb or drunk, Niall found himself getting in for a closer look.

“This here,” Theresa said, inches from the corpse and not missing a beat. She indicated toward the medallion around the corpse’s neck. “Peruvian. Gold. This is Arthur Remington III, for sure.”

She passed the medallion to Niall. The body’s arms were folded around a flat, square chest. Theresa tugged the chest from Arthur. She grunted from the weight, again, passing it to Niall. She re-examined the body.

We were all born stupid.

That one's for the humans in the audience, but to the universe itself, I present a less cryptic critique. Letting me get good at something was a bad idea. You fucked that up. Now I'm gonna bully you into submission. I'm gonna dominate you. I'm gonna eat your lunch and you're gonna find the slots in this hallway locker provide plenty of oxygen.

You shouldn't have let me get good at anything. You shouldn't have taken the boot off my neck. I am the product of the Baby Boomer generation's pod-grown scrub-science. If I'm the endgame of their legacy-defining ladder-climbing, man, I understand why the current-olds would rather people not shine a Bollywood-silver spotlight on their trophy case's malformed shape. I was born stupid, and it only took me the better part of a lifetime to get good at living with myself.

THREE | The Remington Mansion

Each step was an intrusion. Desperation put a corkscrew to Niall’s brain. Walking, he kept opening his mouth to speak, then not. He kept testing different smiles to catch Theresa’s attention. He had settled into a resting state at his age. He moved like a young man faking maturity—chin up, nods to confirm understanding, bit of a smile for confidence. His suit jacket and pants were too big, frayed and ripped up its right side. A patient expression roosted on his face, noticing the approaching wood and saying nothing. He nearly lost a shoe in the eroded shoreline path. His pant-cuffs were stained black up to his shins. The bend in the bay seemed only a persuasive nudge from tumbling into the sea.

The path sent them through the indomitable heath and thorny Scottish gorse into the trees. Deeper, where the wood grew thicker, a fountain welcomed them to the hidden humanity. The fountain could fit in at a city park with its size. Leaves choked its basin. The fat angel atop its center spout was missing half its face, shorn off in some mediocre vandalism.

Past the fountain, Niall and Theresa came to the mansion’s front door. He was glad he had not attempted to drive his BMW. Not to mention the loamy road, the mansion’s welcome-way that might have once greeted automobiles—or perhaps even carriages—was snarled with vines.

Seaspray’s salty grip and green algae attacked the mansion’s every available surface. More decapitated cherubs and iron barred windows made the building a self-devouring mausoleum.

My dog knows all the sounds I make.

She knows what they mean, little *skrks* and *lomps* and *clanks* communicating where I am and where I'll be next. Hanging out is her only objective. And playing objective-1A. And the best places to hang out and play are in a room with a human. While she cannot speak, she remains intelligent, confident, and conscientious.

In truth, I cannot speak, either, not at least in a human-on-dog conversational manner. Lucky me, she knows all the sounds I make. 

I must not make many sounds. She must be quite confident in herself.

CHAPTER I — BURIED IN THE CAGE GARDEN

ONE | The Water Dog

On orders from her employer, Theresa Leone spent a month breaking, entering, and ransacking the most storied estate on the Scottish coast. In that time, the locals hadn’t spared a care. Theresa sprinkled bribes into any conversation she couldn’t fib through. Hearsay suggested the mansion’s eccentric owners, the Remingtons, were a dead bloodline, or at least timezones and hemispheres away, perhaps drinking life away on a yacht off Ibiza.

Despite her diligence, Theresa’s efforts remained fruitless. The precise object of her desire remained hidden in the mansion’s deep corridors and limitless rooms.

One still morning, when it seemed the sun could not rise above some gray zenith, Theresa was elbow-deep in a space behind a library bookshelf when an animalistic yelp came into earshot. It shot forth again over the crash of the morning surf. Downstairs, Theresa exited onto the rear terrace. She listened.

I recently reconsidered my brain's ever-expanding size during one of my routine visits to the Shriekbox—that's the industry term The Team of Doctors used for when I jam a pair of clean gym socks into my mouth and convulse to existentialism's shrill power chords.

Upon this occasion, we are faced with a tragicomedic conundrum.

Small question: is my brain too big?

Tinier answer: have you ever actually seen your brain, man?

The point stands firm. I may simply have a brain too big for mankind's polite, powerful, modern, cow-fucking civilization. My brain was chainsaw-sculpted from a perfect 74-ft cube of glacial ice. Once The Team of Doctors got in there, and the lingering petrol fumes faded, Broadway-ready floodlights revealed there wasn't just ice up in that bitch. There were unpolished black diamonds. There were neglected laundry piles. There were pockets of love. There were decades of accidental nihilism. There were even spheroids of blank space. Just, like, gobs of extra-dimensional antimatter.

Even still, something must be done! There's so much. There's too much. There's a world of things that need doing, and thoughts that need tending, and it's just too much.

Something must be done about the size of my brain.

No non-sociopathic person sets out to be an impostor. We wade into those waters. The sensation rises around your waist, weighty, until you adapt to the gravitational restraint. Or, you find shallower shores and immediately recognize you'd subjected yourself to a lie, now free from the tide's pull.

We assume a life of cowardice because we're too inured with the comforting weight of waist-deep denial. That denial is the repetitious voice, tick-prickling the soft skin behind your ear, chanting: "You're not good at this, you never were, and you're too frightened to fucking change."

That voice is talking about the comfort in skills we've never learned. Or never improved. Or never tested. Or believed it wasn't a skill at all, that it's just like the air you're breathing right now. It's just oxygen. It's just chemicals. It just goes along with living.

That voice is talking about our willingness to maintain comfy cowardice in ignorance, and while this gradual slide into impostorhood bears wide applications, we'll be addressing the cowardice of bad writing as an example of this sensation.

Story twists are memorable. They're a shock. Audiences are settled, comfortable, and aware of a narrative's established rules, be they near to our reality (you can't jump a skateboard over a gorge!) or representing a heightened reality (some people see ghosts everywhere!).

Then, a twist. Existing rules are suddenly broken. Fast math forces an audience to re-contextualize what they've understood thus far. All at once. Immediately. As the story continues around them.

But can a story dependent upon a twist endure beyond that moment of shocking re-contextualization? Can it endure repeat engagements?

Plenty of marvelous stories unfold with additional elegance upon a second or third experience. Repeat audiences notice obvious clues. They spot clever setups, invisible the first time. When the twist now approaches, it's clear as day. Perhaps they even feel dread? The odorous tragedy is pungent from miles off and we watch through cracked fingers as the Shakespearean hammer comes down, as we know it must, and always will.

If the story's desired effect of tragic dread is only achieved on Experiences No. 2-Infinity, why does the plot twist need to be hidden from sight during Experience No. 1?