Liza's first day in the lab was exhausting. The clinical trials were going well but the work was nevertheless draining. Her last subject, a man in his late 30's though already balding, collected his pay from Liza and left, leaving the door slightly ajar. Liza tried to finish her notes as quickly as she could so she could rush home to bed, but a high pitched whistling stung her ears at their deepest points. The whine sizzled in her brain. She walked to her office door and the sound abruptly stopped as she shut it, as if it were sucked out of her ear canals by a vacuum.

Liza made some notes on a few more PET scans before heading home. The brain images were by far the most fascinating part of her research. The study picked up where Tsutomu Oohashi's left off, considering the hypersonic effect. The concept had greatly enthralled Liza, how frequencies inaudible to humans might affect our brains. There were all these sounds in the world that our eardrum's measly range of 20-20kHz could not perceive. But what do the frequencies outside of that range do to us? Can we feel them in our bones, on our skin? Do they beat around our brains to make us feel something we aren't consciously aware of? Liza wanted to know and she was going to. Today's images were wonderfully enlightening. Liza played music for the subjects that contained frequencies up to 30kHz and the brain scans started to light up. The frequencies were doing something, something never researched before, and Liza was elated that she would be the one who found the answer.

The next seven days of research went by without a hitch. On the eighth day, three subjects had opted out of the research. Reasons varied, one had a daughter who had fallen ill and no longer had time. Time was also an issue for the second subject who had just been promoted. The third had a stranger story. In writing, she gave her reasoning:


"Henceforth, I opt-out of the research study taking place at ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories on  the topic of the hypersonic effect. I wish I could continue as I feel the study truly need to be carried out but I fear for my health. I have been fraught with night terrors of a demonic sort every night since starting the study. I have seen Hell in its entirety with vivid clarity. I could replicate my visions with great detail but on nothing less than a massive brick wall and painted only with blood. Creatures that had human features melted and pressed onto rigid black forms. They were shaped like the rocky cliff sides of mountains and bolted to the ground. They had eyes that leaked out of their sockets. I have memories of fire, spouting from their cavernous mouths and a scream that sounded like it came from a thousand throats in sequence, passing through one and feeding into the next. I only hope these sights fade but a part of me senses they will be forever etched in my soul."


Liza read the letter at her desk and shut her eyes. She tried to visualize the nightmare from the letter and was certain she could only comprehend on a level that a toddler could understand calculus. She could picture the scene but couldn't feel the fear that was obviously evident in the letter. Liza couldn't stop her research on this one slip and hypothesized that the woman might have some underlying psychological issues. As she considered how to get around this complication, a new email flashed on her computer screen. Another subject was dropping out. The message was nearly identical to the other subject's letter. The man described a scene of fire burning across a rocky field of hardened corpses. Screams that came from a feedback loop of deformed mouths, agape and contorted. He too mentioned a fear that the images would never leave his memory, mentioning how they had "crystallized in his mind, a permanent structure until his death and maybe after." Liza's eyes welled up with tears, she saw her research slipping away. The board would see it as dangerous and the grant money would dry up.

Her decision to shred the letter and delete the email was not an easy one but it was necessary. This was not a time for a moral debate, she was on the cusp of discovering what could be perceived beyond what we know is humanly possible. This research was going to make great strides in trans humanist technology, and she needed her name on it. She needed to be part of the pantheon that told people they were not limited by their senses. That there was more to being human than what only our senses perceive. We could be more than human.

The next three days of research were rife with more letters of subjects dropping out. They all recalled hellfire, and the smell of ash so thick it coated the sinuses and let through only a sliver of lava-hot, black air. Liza tore up every one.

On the twelfth day, Liza was brought into a board meeting where she was questioned by her colleagues on the rampant drop-out rate of subjects in their study. It was severely hampering the research and it needed to be known if there were reasons to stop the work altogether. Liza put on her best face and explained the subjects all had time conflicts in some way or another. One of her colleagues pulled out a letter from a stack of papers, slid it over to Liza, and asked her to explain it. It was from one of the drop-outs from day eleven. They had sent a copy of the letter to every researcher, desperately asking for the study to be put to an end. They went on to describe their decimated life. His wife had moved out from the fear that her husband would  slice off her face in her sleep. She had awaken to him one night standing over her in a trance and holding a kitchen knife, pressed hard against her lips. Liza saw no way out. This man had been perfectly sane before the study and eleven days in had gone mad. She had no defense. She was let go from the research that day and would be facing a hard road if she wanted back into any sort of research. She would forever be known as one who did not work within the scope of morality, she would be admired by few and spurned by most.

Liza made her way home, her mind cloaked in despair. She never felt desperation like this, the want to go back in time, to not tear up the letters. To face the facts that there was something dangerous in her research, in exposing people to great amounts of frequencies higher than their ears could perceive. Maybe that would be her next endeavor, to learn what sort of devil hid in those sounds. But did she dare? The fear the subjects felt, the sick states their minds had been left in... did she dare expose herself to even more of the trigger of these experiences, in the name of science? She questioned why she had been safe this whole time, why she never had the nightmares. She went through the experiments too, as she applied them to her subjects on a daily basis.

More fatigued than she had ever been before, Liza collapsed into her bed, weighted down by the sorrow of losing her future. She switch the bedroom lamp off, but didn't close her eyes to sleep. For in the shadow of her room that should have been tinted black was a sea of grey faces. And Liza knew that darkness would never be dark for her again.

I died tonight.
He killed me with his bare hands. I didn't feel a thing until I was almost dead. I was too high on the chemicals, far inside my mind.
I felt my mouth go numb as he pushed his fingers into the flesh of my neck and squeezed.
Under his grip, my throat collapsed and the shutters of my eyes flew open, throwing off the dust of the night. The greens rolled forward, once magnetized by the black hole of a destructive ego, now locked into a blue murderous gaze. I saw a fire burning so furiously that the whites of his eyes fluoresced and I was blinded.

I knew this would happen. Just never this way.
He had knives. He had guns.
But here he was instead; on top of me, knees on each side of my ribcage, using only the clench of his knuckles to force the life out of my body.

I was pressed up against the gap, seconds between a ceased existence and life. I thought I would see my memories flash before me but all I saw was sand. Falling. One minuscule grain at a time.

I feel an aching in my heart for something more than what I have.
Maybe more friends. A companion. A soul.
I feel nothing that I wanted.
But art keeps me here. I feel alive when I hear music.
Jazz, classical. Corny country songs and old school rap.
I can feel the pores of my skin open up to soak it in.
I can feel it inside when I think of what I love. The deep sea, the deep sky.
I've learned about the true meaning of platonic love in art history.
It's beautiful and we've been using it wrong for years.
I await him, Bacchus, to find my abandoned self on an all forgotten shoreline.
I'm going to be full again. I'm going to encounter those resplendent structures from the inside.
I will touch the walls underneath the hands of the architect.
And I will build myself into something new and strong.
I will live on for centuries and I will endure this storm.

Realizing that all of your life has culminated up to this point.
I am at the end of my rope.
This candle burned at both its ends. The wax then burned my tethered hand.
No time for what I want. I am bound to a behavior that I have chained myself to.
Learning to see art. To make it, but not feel it.
I try to feel but it hurts.
It aches to want them.
It's incessant and it yearns.
I'm trying to fill an empty space within myself.
But I'm throwing pebbles into a black hole.
I couldn't say what I needed to and now it's much too late.
The next one won't get away.
I will someday claw at the feet of a man who could bring me back to life.
I am twenty one, I am dead and I have nothing to barter with.
But I can sacrifice my old self to a higher power in a bottomless pit.
I will chant the name of the omnipotent beast and I will be made whole, and beautiful.
I will be queen, and I will reign.

My heart is in my mouth

I could meet a man one day
And feed him pieces of my heart
Then he would spit them out and say
He doesn't like the taste of blood

So I'll cook them a just a bit
Just enough to make them sit
But before the stove is on
I'll turn around and he'll be gone

What do you think the most painful part of being beaten in the face with a hammer would be? There's the part where your bottom lip gets split wide open. And then there's your teeth caving into your mouth. Your gums separating. Your jaw bone collapsing. There's the part when the peen hits your nose and your septum crunches into your throat. When the bridge cracks into pieces. By this time, your face is decimated. You feel everything but nothing really feels whatsoever. Then you feel the singe of your burning cheek as the bone gets folded into your face. Your eye follows it inwards. The only intact bit left of your mashed visage is the bone of your brow, then it gets pulverized together with the meat of your brain and the splinters of your skull. Your face is in fragments but all you can do is imagine the pain of it. The nerves are done feeling but in your mind, you know you've been butchered with a hammer and that's what makes it hurt.

These are the thoughts that keep me up at night. This is how I describe my life. Living isn't miserable itself, it's just a clump of days that are really quite miserable, each and of their own. And then when I feel like smiling or crying, I don't know if it's right or if I'm sick. The thing that makes me sad the most is nothing; nothing at all. I've taken on a strong belief that to exist is inherently absent of any kind of meaning and it's depressing. But it makes my life easier to mange and live through. Knowing that nothing really matters makes every day pretty fucking easy. It makes every problem fade away. Knowing that when I die, there will be nothing is strangely satisfying. I don't need to be remember or missed. Even now. Sometimes I feel like I have no emotion and sometimes I feel like there's a lot in me. In real life, I am a shell of what I really am. I was out with some friends last week and they said "You really have no emotions, don't you?" And I laughed as I said "I do! I cry all the time! Like, 10 times a year." I really don't know if it's a lot or barely any. Maybe I really don't have a lot of emotion, but it's alright because I think I could seriously drive myself insane with any more.