and this one’s from the heart
if i said time waits
at my command, i’d be lying
but we do play Tom Waits
we’re also a cover band

the beat starts slow
the horn plays blue
they all smile the smiles
of men who are blue
and hiding it well
but then he sings
and it’s like a bell rings
everyone knows it makes
more sense
to be blue

“looking for someone who
you can hold on to
someone who wants to
hold on too
someone blue
cause me, I’m so blue”

even though it’s not the
greatest song, just decent
there’s the feeling behind it
and everyone in the audience
finds someone
to hold on to

well, man
you know i’m all
out of
tunes
so tip or move on

and he sings
“take it man
like a man
suffer
and survive is all you should
ask for now”

Despite this, the big spark still doubts. It can sense the ground ever closer. It wants to make it. The big spark will not live much longer. It just wants to reach the ground, like the others cannot. The metal grinds again, and more little sparks trail behind the big spark. They burn and burn out. The big spark will burn out. The big spark doubts whether it will burn long enough. Who will measure once it has burned out? How will it be able to tell that it burned long enough if it does not know what comes after? It will not know, and so it doubts.

The big spark doubts whether it really matters. It wants to burn long. It does not even care to burn bright. It is big, so surely it does, but it does not care to burn bright. Burning bright, it might be caught in the corner of someone’s eye. Someone might happen to look upon it just as it burns brightest, but the chances are too slim. They are not big enough. If it burns long, someone may look upon it for a time measurable, at least. They may see its whole existence. The big spark sees the entire existences of the little sparks. It likes watching, even as it begins to burn out. It continues to fall.

The big spark has hope, for a moment. The moment passes, and the big spark doubts. A little spark flies past it, but burns out as soon as it is seen. The big spark finds this foolish, and begins to doze off. It can feel the ground coming closer. Its short existence sometimes feels long, but it knows it has existed for a time barely worth knowing. It cannot know time, but it knows this. It must know, so that it may doubt. And the big spark does doubt. It doubts itself.

The metal is grinding again. More sparks follow their paths through the empty air. While they burn, it is not empty, but they do not burn long enough to fill it. One little spark moves particularly fast. It should not, but it does. It has not existed long and it does not doubt. The big spark does not envy it, however, as it does not doubt because it does not know. It is empty, because it does not burn bright enough. It does not care. It’s creation has flung it past the big spark.

And as it hits the ground, ahead of the big spark, it quickly burns out. The big spark has existed. This little spark was barely burning before it burned out, but it acheived. It was a consequence of its origin. The big spark grows dull. The big spark can still see the ground, and it knows it was accurate. The big spark doubted, and the big spark was correct to doubt.

The big spark burns out in the empty air. The big spark does not doubt anymore.

This had been true all his life. He had thanked God every day for making him a man instead of a woman. As a man, he felt powerful. He knew he wouldn’t feel that way as a woman. Never. But now, in this twisted world he had unwittingly become a part of, this feeling had blossomed into something more.

So many had given away their right to call themselves men, so many had “embraced evolution” as they so sickeningly called it. They were putting foreign objects on and in their bodies! They let godless men of science penetrate them and insert all manner of monstrous machines into their bodies. They had been created in the image of God and they threw it away! He supposed he could understand women partaking in this sacrilege. They had always been against God and men and did all they could to take his God-given power. But men were already masters of the earth. There is nothing they were meant to have God had not already given them or promised them. Some even went so far as to forsake their whole bodies, forsake their souls, to “move beyond the limits of the flesh”. It was all wrong. How had the world gone so disgustingly wrong. Immortality was for the dead.

He sat at the bus stop, his face pressed right up against the glass side. Droplets of rain reflected all manner of colors, neon and electric lights, recreating the soulless city around him. He thought back to when he first moved to the city. Money was the problem. Money was always the problem. Money and women. Everything was moving into cities and cities were moving everywhere, spreading out till some states were basically a conglomeration of different cities. New York had become indistinguishable from New York City, and New York City is where he had been forced to go. He was a schoolteacher. Schools moved to the cities and so did the schoolteachers or they were left behind to rot. Rotting wouldn’t have been so bad, now that he thought about it.

Busses came and went. There were two or three of them. Not enough people on any of them to make the effort worth it. He had put so much effort into this and he wanted God to be happy with his work. He closed his eyes, and God told him how pleased He was. He smiled and opened his eyes, and there it was. The bus was loaded with people. A man approached the bus and stepped on it, grabbing the frame of the door to pull himself in. The man’s metal fingers gripped the frame, followed by a faint sound of clicks and whirrs, and the man was inside the bus. It was disgusting. He would enter the bus with only his God-given body. People relied on machines too much. He pulled his coat closer around him, but not too close, and entered the bus. As he swiped his card to pay the fare, the bus driver smiled at him and his metal jaw reflected a distorted image of him, arm outstretched, gripping the card in his fingers. He swallowed his vomit and stepped to the back of the bus. It lifted off the ground and propelled itself forward.

The bus moved smoothly along its route, unaffected by any bumps or cracks in the street as it hovered three feet above the ground. Knowing he couldn’t wait too long, it was only a few minutes after the bus began moving again that he stood and moved to the middle of the bus. A few people noticed him, but most didn’t. They were too engrossed in their own selfish desires to notice anyone but themselves. Soon they would be cured of their faults and shown the error of their ways.

He dropped his coat, letting it slide off his shoulders and down his arms till it lay on the floor, bundled around his feet. A woman looked at him and screamed loudly. It made him sick, it sounded like it had been filtered through a metal tunnel filled with obtuse protrusions at odd angles. To him, it sounded like someone drowning in metal. The bitch had put metal in her throat for whatever reason. Soon he’d show her, he was about to show them all. His hand moved to the detonation trigger attached to the makeshift bomb he wore around his torso.

The next few moments were bliss. Those around him who had sold their souls for power knew their faults as he screamed God’s condemnation of them over the screams of terror. Those who had remained true to His design would be at peace soon, freed from the sin of this metal world. Once it had been Eden, a garden. Now it was nothing but metal, empty metal. The fire erupted from heaven, channeled through him. It washed them all away. Cleansing and condemning, it was good. The tears streaming down his cheeks were wiped away, and then they were all corpses. The bus sat in the busy street, a charred husk.

It was metal, and it was empty.

The exposed faux-muscle was soft to the fingers, but not frail. Squishy, even, but not frail. It gave at the slightest pressure, only pushing back when the gel inside became active. The packets were filled with a million invisible machines that controlled this new part of me, and I controlled them as best I could. The metal was inert, of course. It was just metal. I was just flesh. Flesh that had became painfully ancient in so short a time as I had existed.

It still trembled sometimes. I would watch it like some thing that might jerk into sudden, furious, violent action at any moment it desired. Foolish thoughts. Metal did not desire. Only flesh desired. My flesh had trembled too. The metal did and did not do so many things, but it still trembled. It was my brain, I knew. I could always feel it just before it happened. My brain, turning against me simply because I continued to exist. Some day it would move against me with more force. These were just warning shots. The flesh and blood was plotting against me every moment. My metal would never turn against me.

My fingers, the new ones, touched the flesh of the arm. It registered warm. As my fingers brushed against it, the flesh twitched ever so slightly. It was afraid. Like so many, it feared the future. Flesh saw the future as a lurking beast, and I was letting this metal creature probe the flesh. It found weakness. How could it not. Even as I sat there, motionless but for the metal and the trembling, I could feel the weakness permeating the painfully ancient parts of myself.  I saw scars, mosquito bites, small cuts from various work I had done outside days before. I saw how soft the flesh was. My metal was hard.

The flesh fingers returned to the metal, probing in kind as it had done. It found no weakness in my metal, of course. The fingers wrapped around the arm, gripped it. They squeezed. Nothing. They became tired and had to stop. They rested and tried again somewhere else. Not even a scratch. I laughed at its futile attempts. Still, it gave one last effort, this time focusing what little strength remained in them on a single finger, the one they perceived to be weakest, but it was still futile. My metal had no weakness to the flesh. Stupid, old flesh. It continued to rot away even as these things transpired.

My metal decided now it would return in kind. It was not sudden, furious, or violent. Slowly moving towards the flesh, it wrapped around the hand, closing around it. My metal did not tremble. My metal pressed harder till there was a snap, and another, another snap and then tearing. The hand came off and its weakness was more apparent than ever. My metal did not bleed.

The flesh continued to snap and tear as my metal moved up the arm. It spread across the table. Old flesh and blood and bone thrown to the surface as my metal tore it away, cleansing my self of it. I would be flesh no longer. I would be with my metal for eternity. I looked at it with longing eyes, soft eyes, flesh eyes. As what remained of the flesh of the arm was removed, the metal moved towards the eyes. The soft eyes. It would all turn against me eventually and the soft eyes already had. They impaired my sight, making some things appear blurry, simply because they were flesh. I hated them for it. How dare they. I would remove them and all the flesh that dared rot and torture me. I would replace it with more of my metal. I would be at one with my metal. I watched the soft flesh being spread across the table till I felt the soft eyes giving way under the pressure, popping and tearing.

My metal was hard.