His fingers hover over the keys, those glistening keys that reflected the stage lights shone white. The piano is brand new; the maple’s finish is flawless and still has a strong scent of process, the machine warmness and sharp sawdust stench. The black keys are dark jewels, flush juxtaposed with the white. There is a sound to their appearance, a sound that echoes their sound, a ghostly lingering of a note long struck humming, droning, rolling, ringing into nonexistence, the physics of vibration giving life to silence and death to sound.

The silence is deafening to him. The air is still and thin. His tongue dries and his lips followed suit. Nerves kick in. A quick glance to the left show an eager, discerning audience. They sit with cocked heads, half-squints, cleared throats and stone stares. Some purse their lips and caress their knuckles, wrists, necks, cheeks unconsciously, curiosity and doubt twirling in the fluids of their eyes.

He focus on his hands, his fingers, his wrists, the entirety of his arms as they hold there, waiting for the moment to strike, flesh-colored vipers lovingly stalking prey, treasuring the moments before the kill. The keys, black and white mice, intertwined, melodious in their placement.

One more quick glance to the audience. Their faces warped in motion, catching them in their turn to their neighbor. They whisper their secrets to one another, may they be strangers or lovers, for days or years, and they bookend a performance.

Three long, lingering seconds.

His hands come down on the keys, a thunderous chord rumbles from the housing, fingers struck and made electricity with the keys, the strings resonating, ringing with violent force, the emergence into being instantaneous and jarring. The sounds of the abstract realm shatter the mortal plane, the distant wonderment of careening into melancholy as his left hand inches down, deepened thunder, and the glissandi glories up, demons to heaven. The sheet music is a reminder of where to be, but he knows where his fingers must strike, where the thunder must echo and ring.

A slight breeze blows in from somewhere. The movements of the earth are now becoming more apparent to him as he plays. He thinks of the sky, darker still. He thinks of clouds post-dusk, lingering like lonely barpatrons without someone to go home with after the last call.

He feels his hands lighten, like those lonely clouds. There is a shift coming and he is too light to bring the chords. Islamey beckons from some deeper nightmare, reaper with scythe in hand. There is fear in his performance, but there is fear in the music. Bald Mountain always comes to mind to him, fearful music.

The keys beneath his fingers continued to sing, the rumblings of lower octaves tapping from inside the body, the plinks from up on high twinkling and ending with a severity. He brings the shift: glissando! waves of notes glimmering to! and the music twists into some serpentine beast, writhing in complexity and boating akin to a schoolyard child with his newest thing.

The sheet music is crawling with vermin of determinate size, across clefs, jumping from cliffs like lemmings, cows and sheep leaping to salvation’s just end. Yet, among the formality of the complex, linear notes, there is a freedom, a loosening of the noose and shackles that hold many a musician to the chair, electric and deathly, a morose and putrid breath from craftsmanship’s deeper tomb. That freedom is frightening. It is unfamiliarity, the blank canvas of a painter’s hell-tossed dreams. There is image and sound, of glory felt so entirely, but it is distant and soon fades. That is fear, and that is life’s truth.

The freedom brings upon a finale, one of breathlessness and grandeur, a crescendo without the brass, the strings and percussion not absent, but in spirit and effect, clangs and thuds of the kettle drums rattle birthed and borne untrue and merciless. It rings! on the middle and rings! on the high, every little plink struck the stone arches, they shiver like buttresses in The Recognitions’ exodus, who soon echo like ignorance’s history. Each crack comes like God’s Will itself, cherubs fluttering away, sounding their trumpets, Gabriel to Judgment. All face Judgment in this most wondrous of finales, this most just of ends. The arches fall, they are the meteors of kings, and the sky falls with the arches that held it up.

There is only a moment’s last abrupt note when he turns. The temple, steeple he performed greatness within, the last mode he so taught willful beauty to the ignorant masses, brought pain and death, and in the second of realization, Judgment is upon him, the last note still ringing, still saying those unspoken words.

The light of day shines through, upon death, upon chaos, and there is no life here anymore.

I feel my mind wander. I feel the thoughts drift into queue and simply allow the waves to crest and crash, draw back and come into again. It worries me that this happens so often. Before, I could simply stop doing and start thinking and the images, the ideas, the words, they would come in greater numbers than I could count. They were of the curse of Richard Madoc suffered, in Gaiman's "Calliope", though I never really felt consumed by them. I never succumbed to anything my mind created. I put them in their proper place, did what I needed once their usefulness was needed, and kept them in servers stacked in warehouses unknown. Before, I was an intellectual. I read for learning and pleasure. I picked apart the carcasses and found what made them tick. I understood being and mind like nobody I knew. I heard talk of geniuses doing the same, but they were labelled negatives.

Now? What do you call a hollow shell? "Empty"? I hear that so often, but there's something there, there's something inside. I can feel it there. 'But can you feel it?' some lost friend asked me. I guess the inflection matters. I can feel something, but it's different than what I felt before. Some call it happiness, some relief, but I don't think I can call it that. I experienced happiness and relief differently than others would, I think. Happiness was not tethered to things or people, rather abstract concepts that I could bring to fruition by creating and doing. Relief, I don't think I remember how that feels, if I felt it at all. I feel some faint thing that I can't describe. It fills my heart with a vague warmth randomly. Nothing happens for it to come to, but I don't think I should know. Reasons bring down the event by trying to complicate it with truth and validity.

Prison at such a young age can do horrible things, I guess. But what constitutes "horrible"? No clue. It's a more societal choice than mine.

But I guess I have to deal with this feeling for the rest of my life. It's terrifying to conceptualize that. A foreign feeling, riveting, yes, but god, what does it entail? Anger? There was enough of that before. It got me in and it could get me in again.

A few days ago, sitting in a coffee shop, I took a napkin and a pen given to me by the nice warden who let me out on that Sunday and I wrote a poem.

The sun keeps me warm

Hope does not

I don't feel any different

Please, oh me.

I wrote over particular letters to expose some forced message.

The sun keeps me warm

Hope does not

I don't feel any different

Please, oh me.

Some feigned cry for help, I guess. I don't need it from anybody. I just decided to do it.

Is that flippant? Or distressing? Just deciding to write something like that? It would concern a mother, no doubt, but who else? Does anyone else concern for a particular person like a mother does?

I want my mind to wander now. And that's the pain of it: when I want it to, it doesn't. You don't force an ocean to create waves to crash on the shore. It just does. You don't force it to foster ecosystems and entire species. It simply does.

I often find myself lost in some unexplained land, an openness, like a field, but the field is like water, but also not. I can never describe it. My mind fills in the blank with words I can not read, written at angles I can not achieve. It is the demon in the corner of my eye, some foreign event going on beyond focus, past acknowledgement, else it disappears. I can see it there, in the field of non-water, moving and reacting to itself. It is violent and calm, hard and soft, harsh and serene. It's the pulsating of imagination, the fertility of it bursting and blooming. In it, the Face of God, the Answers, all of knowledge applicable and needing, but once I turn to see it, it's gone. The non-water turns to true desert, unliving, unloving. But there are ghosts. Ghosts of what was, too faint to be discerned, blurred by clarity.

I learned to envy those ghosts. They can disappear but be wanted. They can fade into obscurity and and bloom into popularity. Maybe I can understand what I see one day. Maybe then I can finally die.

But I lay here, my mind wanting to wander, but my wanting interfering. A phrase passes through:

I'm free.

And I wonder if I actually think that or I'm just saying it. The room I'm in, a small white room, a bed, a chair, an end table, and a lamp throwing yellow light, all this does not particularly feel free, but there are no bars on the windows, no iron doors locking from the outside, no other voices screaming mockery and despair, rape and safety, no men to tell me what I'm supposed to do, where to go, what parameters I'm limited to, no indefinite barriers. I can walk out the door, through the hallway, down the stairs, out the front door, and I can walk. Around the block, to the city, to the dense country, to states neighboring and distant, to countries hostile and caressing, I can walk there. No prison gates, no barbed wire to say there's a height limit to this distance, there is simply the roads, the sidewalks and the place where they end, where trees become the etching on the map, where gods old and new beckon follow, where I can only fear what Mother bears upon the earth, not just I, a solitary object upon Her domain, a noble two-foot where the almighty Four-Foot reign.

I guess I am free. I am free. I feel the shackles break, the chains rust and hinge loudly, breaking as the breeze blows through them. Relief? I don't know, I can never tell if relief is a feeling of reassurance or the beginning of new anxieties not realized.

I am free.

If I repeat it enough, it can become true, right?

I am free.

I am free.

I am free.

The realization will kick in. I know it. The shackles are broken. The chain is dust.

If I tell myself that, it'll come.

I am free.

I'm too pensive for my own good, Perry tells me. Too withdrawn. Men who I've felt a distinct longing for tell me I'm disconnected. Aloof, some say. I've been called "emo", whatever that means nowadays. Hard to love.

Maybe I am free.

I feel free.

My mind is wandering.

I am free.

The sun sets in the east. Another land lives, awake and willing, thriving.

 I am free.

The moon draws nigh, an artist writes in a word processor.

I am free.

A man draws his last breath, before the computer screen.

I am free.

Wolves come out of the woodwork. Maggots squirm in the dirt, squealing for shit and mother's fetid milk.

I am free.

I am free.

I am

~

free to make his own decisions, right?"

"He's a baby. At least, mentally."

"He doesn't deserve this. 25 years from now? He'll be dead on the side of the road."

"I blame the lack of parenting."

"Funny how it's the faggots gettin' in the most trouble these days. This country is filterin' 'em out."

"Revolutionary's Revolutionary Crime: How A Teenager Conquered the Criminal Underground"

People offering their opinions. Too many headlines about him. I hear every thing under the sun about Aleks' "accomplishments". He tortured people to join the cause, that's what he "accomplished". He was no warlord. He was a fucking kid. He had great intentions, absolutely, but god, you don't cut off a guy's arm and send it packed in ice to his wife and kids. He never asked for ransom, funny enough. There was enough money going through the system for him to do what he pleases. He simply had people dead inside on his side. He had an army of zombies and sheepherders to take the Alabama government for himself. 

I'm glad he got caught. Little sadist deserved it. I don't care what happens to him in prison.

~

I read that online, over and over until his words burned into my skull and I could see the pixelated text every time I closed my eyes. A former member talking about my arrest. Kept anonymous, obviously, to protect himself from anybody steadfast by my side. None of my affiliates would kill anybody. Murder is despicable. And look where it got me.

Heh. 9 years later. I wonder if anybody still remembers me.

I am free.

I am free to know. Know who still knows me. If they don't want me to know, then that's their business. I don't need to be in their lives anymore. The fact that people cheered my imprisonment shows I made a few enemies. More than a few, I think.

I am free, aren't I?

I'm terrified of being recognized. Not for fear of death. No, at this rate, I wait for death. But there's a lot I must do before any of that happens. I have to find out if The 27 have any sort of connecting thread anymore. I hope it does. Maybe it does. I feel the weight of it come to me. The 27 could be operating. That was the tiny modicum of hope I kindled in prison's dim, damp fire. Under new ownership, perhaps, but still carrying out the message of equality. The message of freedom.

I am free.

We were radicals. The government labeled us a terrorist organization. I guess terror worked back then, when 9/11 was fresh, the dust of 3,000 people still lingering on a firefighter's jacket, a memory, no doubt.

I say "I guess" too much. Too indecisive for my own good.

Life is terror. It's torture and pain.

I'm still a child.

There was obvious bias, considering how the whole country was in some theocratic transformation. A bunch of queers, planning to revolt and become some fearsome entity? Please. It was a stupid idea.

I am not free. Not out here.

No, it wasn't. It was revolutionary. I led an army. People talked about us. They didn't say "a band of delusional fags and dykes". They said "The 27". The mouths of commoners legitimized us. They spoke of us like Lannisters. Sure, we inspired visions of wretchedness. That's what we were. Wretched. We were depraved because we chose to stand up. We were destroying families and communities because when people threw rocks through our windows, we threw them back.

I am free.

Retaliation was not and is not what the homosexuals did. The laws passed against us forced complacency in public and shame in private. If we kept quiet, we could keep free lives. If we spoke out about inequalities, discrimination, anything, we were put on lists, lists that had more meaning than the word could possibly infer. They were blacklists, first of all, but they branched into other topics, your name, God forbid it be included, snaking around and burying itself in the right place, a burn mark on the higher-ups' wooden chests of crushed skulls and horns and swords.

I am free.

Times have changed. My freedom could be put into question.

I am free.

My freedom could mean more than anything now.

I am free.

No, freedom is not all I have.

I am free.

I have my people.

The 27 still remain.

"I thought they would've executed him."

"Nah, too valuable an asset. Pullin' up all those records of voter fraud and shit? C'mon. He knows something about the state that the state don't."

"So what, they're just going to--"

"They're gonna interrogate 'im, for years to come. And he's got 25, and unless you know someone with 2 and a half million jus' sittin' around, they're gonna rail 'im, day in, day out."

"He's gonna tell them, then? About The 27?"

"Nah, he's too stubborn f'r that. He'd sooner rot'n prison f'r the ress of his life."

"Don't say that."

"Issa possibility. Aleks ain't exactly what you call a snitch. The 'suppose'd leader of a terroris' organization'? I dou' he sell his soul for time shave off."

"..."

"He'll be good. We probably won't see 'im again, though."

The Vox Bar was quiet. 2am, Saturday night, it had been at least an hour since the drag show had ended. Most people went elsewhere for their fun, the constant rave pulse of Anti-Eden, the newly open dance club across the boulevard, a likely and simple solution. Few remained, a man or two looking for a good night, a mess of a drag queen stumbling out of the backroom, laughing loudly. It was a night wrapping up for many, yet Markus and Perry had no intention of abandoning their post, two wobbly stools set on the corner of the LED-illuminated bar. A vague beat of some remix or mashup of popular songs had became background noise, bass bumping gently underneath the faux wood floors. Off in a curtain-walled room, billiards cracked with thunder, the brights of lightning dimmed and dulled to the draw of cigarettes. The party was barely alive, dying but not beckoning finality.

Perry was drinking his fifth beer; a man of his size could take a brew and a half before the sweep of bleary drunkenness even remotely brushed his vision. Markus nursed a lime and Coke, though this was some store-brand cola that tasted distinctly watery and had a sort of penurious sadness to it.