"Still" by Jared Wade Strange

      Slung listlessly in a playground swing, a boy rocks in an apathetic oblique course. His dragging feet anchor him loosely to heartless and indifferent sands as his hands fall loosely at his sides. His body leans against one of the coolly detached strands of metal that hold the lopsided and worn leather seat to its dead steel framework. His face leans against that same chain, and the metal pulls back the skin on his dead expression into a one-sided grimace that mocks even the spiteful grins of goblins and imps as they cruelly and happily torment the peaceful dreamers to whom they poke and jab with evilly humorous pains and terrors of the dream world.

      Echoes of inner tortures ran like a silently heard river that sent a steady vibration throughout his being, for his despairing thoughts and fears of the emptiness he felt welled within himself for all these long nights had come to fruition in a single, compressed focus; a single statement had cracked the last wall from an unexpected angle, and his last foundation had crumbled beneath him. And so he stopped. Physically, he had merely withdrawn from the crowd around him, suddenly seized by the unwanted sensation of being out of place, of not knowing where he belonged but knowing that he was not there, so he casually withdrew himself from the verbal dances of everyone around him, and suddenly found himself in an inner quietude as if the world had suddenly turned black and white, with no definition between light and dark.

      So he sat on the swing. And now he swung in his lazy not-quite-circle. And he listened to himself breathe, rasping and dry as if his body given up on lubricating itself. Inside himself, something he could not place had died. It had died long ago, and it had taken him this long to realize it, to see the derelict that is him, broken down on the side of the road like an ancient, abandoned vehicle, habitated by the craven fiends that thrive painfully in the darkest corners of shameful memories.

      Somewhere far away from himself, a bell rang. He felt that he was supposed to answer, but abandoned, derelict machines do not answer such calls. The world moved around him, and a cyclone of motion enveloped him as he let go of his foothold in the realities of identity and waking consciousness.

      A sudden sweeping vision of glorious carnage and burning danced in his eyes, and then leapt away in its cavorting steps. At the site, he stirred; the derelict growled with fresh life in its engine, and his walls righted themselves. Another burst of motion, and he saw his boy rise out of the swing, and the he that was stared longingly at the back of the life that once was his.

      That body and the identity that now filled continued on the live a life that raged ferociously against all who dared oppose it, and burned away in fury every obstacle to its every desire and dream. All who saw watched with childlike adoration and competitive respect as it let no obstacle withstand a drive indescribable and haunting in the night, and it grew to be the hero to which all measured themselves.

      But on a lonely playground swing, he still sits, glowing phosphorescently in the twilight hours of wandering dreamers who come in their mysteriously haunted sleep to that sad place, where still dimly glowing lamps stare longingly on a shamefully forgotten past.