I roll my eyes lazily around the speckled ceiling tiles, replaying the incident in the Mexican Grocers and Eateria earlier that day in my mind. A tie wrapped around a detective’s neck opens the door and walks in. The detective smiles genially.
“Mr. Cole?” I perk up to inform him that he has, in fact, wandered into the correct room. He motions for me to sit, but I am already sitting, and am slightly confused. He takes a chair himself and drops onto it.
“Thanks for coming in, we just need to quick get your official statement on what happened at the Eateria, and then you can head on out.” He takes out a tape recorder and ons it. “Oh, sure,” I respond, phlegmily, then clear my throat. “So I was buying a twenty pack of tortillas at the-”
He waves me down. “Sorry, can we get your full name and address for the…” he motions towards the recorder. I lean forward and nod.
“Howard Baxter Cole, uh, 3515 West Taft Rd.”
“Good, okay, please continue, Mr. Cole.”
“Okay. I was at the Mexican Grocers and Eateria on 5th street at around 11 this morning, and I was grabbing a twenty pack of tortilla shells to make some wraps, and then this dude with a ski mask came in with a shotgun and was like “ahhhh, give me your” my voice hushes, “fucking”, then back to normal “money” and stuff… and I was hiding underneath a shelf full of limes at that point, so I didn’t see him leave or anything. Apparently he got the money.”
The detective nods and scratches his elbow. “Can you describe the assailant, in as much detail as possible?”
I shrug. “I didn’t really see much of him. He was wearing a ski mask. I hit the floor pretty quick.”
The detective cocks an eyebrow and squints. “Would you mind going into greater detail?”
“I dunno, he was wearing a green jacket. Or gray. Green or gray.”
“Was it green or gray?”
“I dunno, green, I think.”
He purses his lips. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I assure you it is in your best interest to assist us fully, Mr. Cole.”
I am not entirely sure what is going on.
“What color was his hair?”
“I… I don’t know, he was wearing a ski mask.”
“I will ask you one more time, what color was his hair?”
“What? How am I supposed to know? He was wearing a ski-”
“I know what he was wearing, Mr. Cole. Is he someone you know? Is that why you’re protecting him?”
“I- I’m not protecting him, I-”
“Either you’re protecting him or I don’t know what the hell you are doing. Is this a joke to you? What the hell are you doing, Cole?”
“What? What? I don’t…”
The detective jumps up, rage pouring out of his eyeballs into my face.
“GODDAMN it, Cole, do you know how long an obstruction of justice can land you in a prison? And not a fag-boy wipe your ass on paper and sniff lollipops in jail cell, a real goddamn fucking exponentially doubling your bleeding anus’s circumference, for-life prison!”
I stand up suddenly at this unexpectedly explicit threat. “He… he had brown eyes, I think,” I stammer at the glistening detective’s beet red face.
“From this point ONWARD,” he hisses at my head. “We are TREATING you as a SUSPECT in this case as an ACCOMPLICE of the ASSAILANT.”
I continue to stammer, hoping that it will help. The detective reaches for me, and I leap backwards, toppling a stack of folders. I just need a second to formulate a response to stop whatever it is that is happening. The detective lunges for me and I smack his arm away. We both realize at the same time that this was a bad decision on my part. I frown as his fist swings towards my cheek, and am knocked into something hard. I blink rapidly and decide I have to get out of this situation, quickly, and do something rather silly.
However, the gun doesn’t come out of its holster as smoothly as I had been expecting. Instead it holds firm, and the detective and I look at each other for a moment that lasts far too long. My brain decides that panic is probably the best course of action, and I decide that it is probably correct. My legs run out the door, but my hands have already committed themselves to stealing a cop’s gun, so the detective hops/runs alongside me, attempting to wrestle away my grip and raining down blows on my crouched back and head.
I consider my present situation, and decide that I have, at some indeterminite point in the past, made a very poor decision.
We round a corner and four police officers turn to identify the source of the whimpering noises coming from my mouth. Luckily, the awkward silence resulting from the situation is halted when I receive a rather severe right hook to my jaw and am suddenly on the floor. Also on the floor, the detective’s gun in my hand.
“Hm,” I mumble, and maneuver myself onto my feet, pointing the gun at the fivesome of blue suits and 9mm Berettas aimed at my chest. They are shouting something, but I can’t really be sure of what it is other than there is a lot of the words “DOWN” and “SHOOT YOU”. I smile apologetically and run away.
There is a pop from behind me and something on a nearby wall explodes into plaster dust. I make a noise that sounds like “eep”. There are some more pops and I dive sideways into another hallway. I seem to be bleeding rather a lot from my upper right arm oh god right anyway onwards and upwards there is a staircase here and I scamper up it.
I am clasping the gun very tightly as blood trickles between my palm and the grip, and am in quite a lot of pain. However, I am on the roof, which is nice. A contrail slowly fades away in the distance. Cars pass on a road several floors below. I stumble over to the edge and peek down, leaving a trail of red spots.
My improvised doorjam of a paintbucket laid on its side does very little to impede the pursuing officers. They leap up the final set of stairs and I direct the nozzle of the gun towards them, attempting to make clear that I am not afraid to use it to barter passage to not-getting-shot-any-more. They do not seem to understand, so I fire off a single round. I am not sure where it hits, but it is certainly nowhere near any of the police. However, they take it as an invitation to shoot at me, and in a very short order I feel a very unpleasant thud in my chest and I fall backwards, off the top of the building.
I am not dead, but I am having a lot of trouble breathing and the flagpole I am hanging from doesn’t really seem to be able to support my weight. The police are peeking their heads over the edge. I fire at them, and they fire at me. I don’t think either of us hit each other with bullets. This is a bad place to be. I see a window several feet to my left, and begin swinging my legs to reach it. I can’t quite make it. I attempt to cross the last few inches by letting go of the flagpole and wallrunning to it. It works about as well as you’d expect.
I wake up several flows below on the sidewalk. Much to my surprise, nothing hurts at all. I stand up, feeling kind of numb and euphoric. I blink a lot of red stuff out of my eyes and hail down a cab, and get inside. I ask the driver to please take me to the hospital, but she just turns around and screams at me. I turn and see her two toddlers sitting in the back seat of the minivan I am bleeding into. She grabs them and I am left alone in the minivan. I look and see police milling out of the building. I cough up blood and drag myself to the drivers seat.
I pull away from the curb into a parked car.

I was cutting a rug in the basement of the Misplaced Genital Fuzz Rash to forget my troubles when a girl of appropriate height and requisite weight did some unknowable type of boogaloo over to me. We exchanged nods. The music was a blaring death-moan of a beluga whale being clubbed to death with mixtables as the two of us bobbed together in a sea of glaring neon. Her face was pockmarked with the black death and slathered with makeup. We began to laugh as the moans increased to an undulating, drumbeat-interrupted scream of pain.
The girl was wearing a striped t-shirt over a tight body, and before I realized what was happening we were back at her apartment, tongues punching at the back of each others throats. It was a grisly scene for her roommates, two straight laced ponytails with worry smudged glasses sticking out the front. I beckoned to them with a curled finger, but they had already left out the front door, unoccupied chairs mocking my seductive gaze. My hand danced around the back of the girl’s shirt only to find it not there, a bizarre and horrible plastic contraption replacing it, connecting a padded fabric covering her chest to itself.
The girl giggled as I tried to make sense of the complicated latching mechanism, and spilled several pills onto the table. I would later learn these were methylenedioxymethamphetamine, but at the time I was on a bit too much E to care.
My breath caught in my throat and I began to cry. The entwined padlock of plastic and fabric twisted and stretched under my clumsy fingers, my face contorted, my vision blurry and distorted. The girl’s laughs became louder and louder.
I stopped myself, breath loud in my ears. Plastic and fabric, these should not pose a significant obstacle in a man’s pursuit of that thing she’s been doing oh god fabric is easily cut and the plastic is soft a knife a knife can get through that so easily like butter she’s like butter the knife cuts through like butter
My hands fill with red, and I pause. I the brassiere slides off, and I am overjoyed.
Moment of clarity. I just stabbed a much younger girl to death with a kitchen knife to remove her bra. I look around and breathe a sigh of relief, at least her roommates weren’t here to see this. How embarrassing.  I am probably not in the greatest state of mind to deal with this, but like my momma said, Ecstacy is the Einstein drug. All it takes is a little concentration and you can something something I down the entire bottle of pills and immediately go blind.
I grope around the dead girl’s apartment and think of a way to get myself out of this sticky situation. I stab the girl a few more times to stop her from making that noise, then drag her to the window. Out of window, out of mind. There is a crash and a scream from below, and I decide to call my mother. I wander around until I find a telephone in the inkiness and dial the number.
“Hi, mom.” I say, hiding my sheer terror at the thought that she might see me naked from the waist down, cool air blowing at my nethers from the loud open window.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Hi, mom, it’s Rube, I was wondering if you could help me out.”
“Who is this! You’re not making any sense!”
“It’s Rube, mom! I’m at this… friend’s apartment and I was wondering if maybe I could get a ride.”
“You’re not making… you’re not speaking… is this Rube?”
“Yes this is Rube. Mom I just need-”
“Look, I don’t know who you are, but you leave me the… fuck… alone.”
There was a gutteral click and an electronic hum, and I stumbled backwards into a potted plant, or a third roommate. I shrieked with primal fury and clawed at it, then drop kicked in its general direction, missing and landing with a sharp crack on one of my arms. Half of my blindness flared neon, gay nightclub pink.
The top of my vision suddenly came back, the top venetian blind gone, a slit for me to peek through.  Men in suits were crowding around me, sunglasses and earpieces and finely combed moustaches. One was shouting into his wrist. I dragged myself across the carpet and they didn’t seem to notice, fibers rubbing across my face. A TV is on, silent and broadcasting my face. I am wearing a suit, and debating an Asian diplomat about tax reform. I am losing.
The men drag me to my private highly modified Boeing 747-200B and we sit in the dining room as we drift away to my home, where I expect to die of natural causes.

I spend most of my day sitting in a chair, I realize, sitting in a chair. The light glints through the window, reflecting off my coffee mug, casting a small square of light on my chest. Why do I stand for this, I think? I am an adult. I am an adult, god damn it, and my parents didn’t make a mistake having me. I tear off my shirt, but the square of light remains, burning into a nipple like the fires of hell itself. I shriek and slam my chair backwards into the cube wall.

The man behind me shouts. He can’t see what’s going on, he doesn’t know about the square, because of the wall. I laugh. It’s so simple. I take a pencil and, since the light has gone, diagram deep into the flesh where it once was. A noise like screaming. I show him the blood dripping down my skin, catching on the hairs and pooling in the button. He doesn’t seem to understand. I gesture towards the window with the crimson pencil, flinging specks of blood everywhere. I am frightened until I realize it’s the pencil that’s bleeding. I leave it in the man and continue on my way.

There is noise everywhere now. All I want to do is stand up, but I’m still in the chair… I think. By this point I’m not really sure it matters anymore. I am pleased by this inner monologue, and think I could have a career on the radio, if only the large men with guns would get out of my way. I make a mental note: head for radio station.

Janice points at me as I head for the door, her mouth working like a fish. I wave. I try to explain that I will not be back for some time, and that she can keep her chair, and that I will not be needing it any longer, but I am not sure she believes me. I get it, there is a process you must follow. You need to ask permission before leaving. I am a rebel, I suppose.

The men are gesturing for me to lie down. I giggle. Not unless you take me out to dinner, first.

The men come closer. I become worried. There is something I am forgetting. I remove my penis from it’s sheath and inspect it, but it remains intact. I leave it out, in case I need it later.

A gun so close to my face I can feel it breathing. I take it and point it at the Janice, and she falls down. I point it at the men, and one of them falls down. The other men go away somewhere, but I tire of their games so I do not pay attention to where. I step over the man on the ground and go outside.

There are lights on top of cars, spinning lazily in the hazy air. People shuffle about. The gun seems to be some sort of secret passkey in this place. I walk through the crowd, miraculously unharmed. I realize my penis is still out, and I feel ridiculous. I use the gun to remove it. There is a pop and a puff of red, and I fall down to my knees.

I feel like I went wrong somewhere, but I don’t know at what point. My arms are covered with blood. My gun is clicking uselessly at the people now, only two or three on the ground. I see the grass rush towards my face.

It is so cold and dark in this place.

I straighten my skirt, lining it up exactly to the horizontal red line from the laser square I set up on the dining room table, splaying across my legs like a hairline gash. I go to my bedroom to put on my earrings and inject myself with 20cc of detomidine. I miss the vein the first time and simply shoot it all into the muscle tissue, so I refill the syringe and inject it directly into the center of my pupil.

I go to the mirror and smile brightly. You’ve still got it, girl. I pause for a moment and worry that I may have taken too much detomidine to simply go to the grocery store, but I try and pass the “heel to forehead” test. Built like a sarcophagus. Steel-Vein Samantha, that’s what they used to call me back in primary school.

I have a little extra time, so I meander over to the kitchen to look for my diaphragm. A girl can never be too careful at the supermarket. I open up a cupboard to get a face full of ground pepper. Not wanting to sneeze, I inhale deeply, coating the inside of my lungs. I idly wonder when I had enough time to fill the cupboard top to bottom with tightly packed black pepper. But there’s no time for idle anything right now, the detomidine is starting to take hold. I can feel its icy black fingers grappling onto the base of my spine, coddling and wrapping the nerves like spaghetti. I feel brackish, and then bold. I shudder. This is a very good day, I think, as the sun shines through the dried animal skins over the window pane, illuminating the wall with an auburn cracking glow.

My hair begins to hurt, and I lie down. I do a shot of tequila laced with camel hair and cough it up all over my sporty top. I realize if I am ever going to go to the grocery store, it should be now. I go.

I come back.

I put away the groceries, but cannot figure out where to put the five heads of lettuce, so I eat them raw and meowing.

So I bet you’re all wondering what I’ve been up to lately. The answer is, of course, playing a lot of Mass Effect. And by “playing”, I mean “dying”, and by “of” I mean “in”. I’m not exactly the best battle strategist, I guess. Probably why I never got into RTSs. That and my complete lack of understanding as to how I have to plop down a barracks if I want to create footsoldiers. Why can’t I plop down two young male/female humans and play some miniature Barry White and then just throw up a mandatory conscription into the army at age 18? Barracks don’t pop out soldiers, pregnant women do. Some day I’ll get that tattooed on somebody else’s trampstamp area.

Too soon?

None of these are mine, much to my dismay.

…and so on.

“Luis, Luis,” I pleaded, tugging on his shirttail as he tried to ignore me and play his game of solo checkers in silence. “I can’t feel my legs. Oh, oh. I can’t feel them, Luis.”

“That’s because you don’t have any legs any more,” he responded, and glowered at me with contempt. He stood up and walked away, holding his checkerboard carefully, so as not to spill the assortment of household items doubling as gamepieces.

I rolled around miserably for a moment, then realized he was right. In fact, everything below my bellybutton was simply gone, entrails dragging through the small coils of carpet as I pulled myself around the dining room. That is the last time I trust Luis to put a grenade in my pants and promise not to pull the pin! I think to myself. But who am I joking.

I look at the bits of my lower half spattered around the room. My foot dangles from a light fixture. My calf slides down the wall. My genitalia I am pretty sure are embedded in the closet. I am about to make a joke about how that makes them gay, but then I realize they are mine. A dot of blood drips from the ceiling and lands on my cheek.

Yuck!

Luis comes in and asks did I say something.

“I said ‘yuck’.”, I reply, with a bit of sass.

Luis’ eyes glaze over with fury. He is shaking with rage as he spills the assorted bottlecaps, coins, pill bottles and action figures off the board and bludgeons me to death with it.

Pas du tout rechomper pas lieu confrederno. Sasi du mon frie je pas quon lieu numencodure. “April” los troi ze-ze non, toei quon fed dres mon pape-lechonfre. Trois pon che lesabre c’en foire. Pos.

Jon

I just got back from the 2009 World Game Developer’s Conference in Sweden, Idaho, and I must say, have I got some pretty excellent scoops for you delightful readers!

1. First up is the long awaited Alan Wake, from which I saw brand new footage compiled from all the old footage Remedy Entertainment had released in 2003. It was some truly breathtaking stuff, with lots of fast cuts and brilliant After Effects compositing. The “Coming…” text was probably the most spectacular of the bunch, wiping in with the movement of the sunlight in the very old footage of time-lapse footage in the gameworld.

2. Developer Bungie, developers of video games for the Macintosh computer system, revealed a brand new IP which looks fantastic- implementing Halo’s penchant for purple aliens and Gears of War’s advanced cover system, it’s “Purple Aliens: Under Cover”. You play as a space marine named John who infiltrates (read: shoots at) a cabal of purple aliens. The spokesperson for Bungie, calling himself “Mike”, implicated that it wasn’t just the gameplay that was revolutionary- the storytelling, utilizing “moral choices” and a “first person viewpoint”, sounds like it could be to video games what Triumph of the Will was to film.

3. Gabe Newell sat around the conference, and we really mean around the conference.

4. Some 2D physics based game won “best Indie Title”, because of the recently passed “all independent game titles must be 2D and based on physics” law.

5. YOU DECIDE