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This old beast of a man, 2024, walks hunched over under his filthy ragged cloak like every mean ogre in every tall tale. Over his shoulder he carries a heavy bag in a dank greasy muslin sack. He feels, more than ever, the weight of time. Even though its only been a year (ONLY!), he feels like he’s been here forever, here is all he can remember. He wishes he was a vampire instead of a year, a zombie, even one of those wee little things….was it faeries? Then at least he would have some chance at redemption – someone else’s blood, someone else’s brains, someone else’s wishes. But he can hope for none of that.
Like any infant, he spent the early months satisfying his body hungers only sleep eat shit pee hold me hold me hold me also walk me walk me walk me and, reluctantly, ‘wash me Desdemona, wash me.’
Later his hungers grew more refined and he started the mischievous years – revolutions, genocides, slaughter, gore, greed, sex. This took him until well past August and even then he couldn’t shake it and accepted that at least greed and sex would be with him all the rest of the 91 days of his life.
By October he felt like a dry, fragile shadow of himself. He became afraid not of death but of disintegration. Already he had to satisfy his lust for life with low hanging fruit – droughts, floods, hurricanes and a monsoon here or there, the odd earthquake, an oncoming plague.
And then there were the long, windy days when he could not eat or drink for watching the deaths all around him, the brilliant golden and incarnadine leaves fallen, blossoms blown away, dust seeking its darker, more solidi self in soil. After months of cynicism all around him where he grew sad and hunched over and old it was finally late December when he sat down to rest, not caring if he ever got up again. He leaned against a tree, looked up at the sky and saw a glimpse and then a glow and then a beautiful show of the Northern Lights and he could not remember ever looking at them before Suddenly he felt the damp moss beneath him and the beauty of all that was 2024 and he was filled with great sorrow and longing to be abandoning this beautiful world into the clueless, careless hands of a newborn child.