Does he grab a rifle and begin executing the patrons of the local fast food franchise? Perhaps she picks up a knife and mutilates her husband. A young adult might take her own life. A young boy might execute his entire family. Some just withdraw, becoming nothing. Others get in touch with just enough of the real world to make living like a human being (for the humans) a matter of possibility.
There are, of course, many kinds of therapy, many of them recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, most of them not so recognized. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, spiritualists, support groups, aliens, strangers, fortune tellers, magicians, witch doctors, friends, family, and self are all warriors in this struggle to kill the virus.
A good bit of my therapy comes from writing stories, and this collection contains a few dedicated to my own particular shadows.Dark Corners is a collection of adventures in minds human and other than human. Some of the voyages are beautiful, inspiring, some are funny, some are sad, and some are terribly dangerous and frightening. These are stories of patients, therapists, counselors, gods, and those simply playing the best hand they can with the cards they were dealt.
Stories to me are little realities in which I have an opportunity to carve out and thereby realize a piece of myself. My pieces, moreover, are scattered in a thousand distant places. When I discover one in a story it’s an important kind of validation to have the reader witness the same fragment. It’s healing, perhaps, but it is also one hell of a roller coaster ride.
If anything, this current collection might be viewed as a chance to sit in on a rather bizarre group therapy session on this and other planets, in this and other realities. As with all such sessions, the goals are insight, truth, relief, and thrills.
Have you ever had a sick thought? A corrupt feeling? Have you honestly inventoried your hates, your loves, your lusts? What was it that created your favorite serial killer? What do you do with your own rage? What will you do with it tomorrow? What are the chances in taking a voyage through an alien mind? What are the dangers of trying to understand minds of our own design? What are the perils of trying to understand ones own mind?
What if you could absorb and become the entirety of another being, adding to yourself, for the first time, feelings?
What if you could enter and walk your own mind, identifying and confronting the monsters that lie in wait there?
What if the only help you can give to another is to help him lose his fear of death?
There are other dimensions and they too must have their dangerous mental cases. What if the insane of our dimension, muttering gibberish to themselves, are actually in communication with the insane of other dimensions? What if they could exchange more than thoughts?
What if you really could go back? Could you handle it? You couldn’t handle it before. That’s why the virus is occupying your brain pan instead of reality. What about a chance to start over, but knowing what you know now?
All intelligent beings we can imagine have mind shadows. The ability to imagine and create is the ability to choose one’s warp of reality. Gods are intelligent beings. What of their dark corners? What kind of help can they seek? What does a god use for a god?
Dark corners only exist because we don’t want to know what’s in them. Yet, when we become aware of a problem through pain or embarrassment, the curiosity to establish the origins occasionally gets the better of us and we take a chance. It reminds me of all those ancient horror movie clichés. Just at midnight the couple enters the huge, ramshackle dwelling, the thunder from the lightning storm shaking the remaining window panes. As the lightning flashes illuminate the murky interior of the house, he turns on a flashlight and plays the beam over the cobweb hung heart of the dwelling. The dust is thick on the floor and furniture. There is, however, a strange set of footprints in the dust on the floor. He shines the light on one and examines it. The foot that made the print was bare, very large, and had unusually long toenails that disturbed the dust between each print as whatever it was dragged its nails across the floor. Nails — or claws.
Suddenly there is a noise, the whunk of something heavy and soft falling against something unyielding, like two hundred pounds of meat against a stone floor. She grabs his arm and shakes his sleeve, causing him to jump.
“Don’t do that!” he says, pulling his arm free from her grasp.
“Can’t we go now?” she whispers.
“What was that sound?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Please, let’s get out of here.”
He plays the beam of light along the floor, following the footprints, until they disappear beneath the door to the cellar. The noise comes again.
“It’s coming from down there,” he whispers. A strange pale mist begins coming from beneath the door as the flashlight goes dark. He smacks the flashlight against his hand and the beam returns. As he goes to the door, she pulls on his sleeve. “We shouldn’t. Oh, please, let’s leave this place!”
He shushes her as he places his hand on the door latch and pulls up, the latch grating as though it hadn’t been opened in decades. As he pulls the door open, the ancient hinges scream and the flashlight goes out again.
He shakes it until the beam returns showing a set of crumbling stone steps leading down into the depths, trails of tattered cobwebs moving slightly with the dank air. “I wonder what made that noise?” he asks, as the light dims and then returns. She stands on the tips of her toes and looks over his shoulder.
“What is down there?”
C’mon.
Let’s find out.
Then Came the Misty Man
If I don’t write it, I forget it, so I write it. It’s not real writing with a pen and paper. The only paper here is for the toilets and they never let any of us have anything sharp like a pen. I understand that. Some of the people in here are crazy. So I write this down on my left palm with an imaginary pen held by my right hand. I’m doing that right now. It sounds silly, but when I write it down, I remember. When I don’t, I forget. I have to remember. There is so little left.
Hicks is hitting me again. It’s unfair. No hospital attendant should ever act like that, hitting the patients. It makes him mad seeing me write these things down. But I have to keep doing it or I’ll forget. Then I’ll wake up all sore and bruised and not know why.
But it hurts, him hitting me. Sometimes it hurts so much my mind moves through the shadows into other lands, other worlds, other times and dimensions. It’s really true. I know because I wrote it down on my hand. One time when Hicks was hitting me, it hurt so bad my mind walked off into the shadows, and there I met the Misty Man. I called him the Misty Man because I needed to write down something right away and I’d never seen anything like that before, a thing made of vapors, lights, and shadows. The Misty Man spoke to me then. He was in the shadows fleeing his own persecutor.
Ohhhhh. Hicks hit me hard that time. Real hard. I’m in for it this time. God, I don’t know why he hates me so. I’m not like the ones who have to be fed or get their diapers changed. I feed myself, wash myself, and go to the toilet alone. He should like me best of all. But I’m the one he likes to hit the most.