AMPLEXUS

In the beginning.

section one: insurgent vegetarians

Dreams, are inexplicable figments of imagination that happen when the average human falls asleep.

Hence, your dreams don't make you special. But Jerome's dreams could barely be considered dreams with how they happen.

It always begins with the miserly old woman, her face was hideous, yet it was porcelain. Cracking porcelain. And all she would do was stare at him. This dream happened twice in  every year of his innocent life. And whenever he woke up, there would be a red dot on his bed, almost like blood and that night, they had automatically become fourteen.

The next impulse that would come out of his brain would be to paint. He'd had easels on easels of disturbing paintings. His parents, the neglecting sex craved maniacs they were, would claim he was a beacon of the devil's ministry. They never took him to church, however. They didn't think he was good enough. They also were to busy drinking to care half the time.

But the last one he drew and painted, was when they paid attention. It was, to detail, a woman, getting eaten by humanoid hawks, black worms creeping out the corners on her red, dilating eyes. One way or the other, CPS would learn about it, and withdraw 10 year old Jerome from the clutches of Mr and Mrs Bartel, and into the hands of their estranged, 'very legal' immigrant Egyptian family friends, The Adels.

State care could be very harsh to a black kid on the streets of Boston, but Jerome was lucky.

This was where he met Pyramus, their only child, and his first friend in all ten years of his life. And Pyramus, was forcefully friends with the cliché rich boy who was 2½ years older than him, Rutherford Vardaman (to be known as Var, as the story progresses, which is the next paragraph).

Eight years had passed since then, and instead of being the well rounded students taking full advantage of their brilliance and planning to enter MIT, they chose to be slackers, who, with the compassion of Var's father, would be big time video game programmers.

They'd gotten their own apartment, which they'd conveniently picked out of the five that the Vardamans own, and turned it to the perfect couch potato haven. The initiative Jerome, the timid Pyramus, who refused to partake in violence, which was ironic, since he was the graphic designer for the very visually disturbing game, and Var, the annoying father figure who believed in the concept of justice and peace, things Jerome knew was just a bullshit loophole of ideas formed by perverted white men over twenty centuries ago.

Of course, in New York they'd be the average frat boy. But in Illinois, they were pariahs.

Jerome had no beliefs. No serious ones. He always thought Hamilton was wrong for not endorsing Burr, though. Everything was either a forceful societal concept that shouldn't be bothered about the way we do, or just a ploy by the government to keep us down. Was he wrong? no. But he had this pretentiousness to it that made it annoying.

OCTOBER 10

Seven AM, and Marilyn Monroe was blasting through the painfully thin walls of Apartment 3B, waking Pyramus up. Despite 9 hours and forty seven minutes of sleep, he still found it hard to wake up, but he did, in frustration. Groaning loudly as he stood up from the bed, limping like a zombie down the hall and stairs, to the breakfast bar, where Jerome was dancing around the kitchen, making breakfast. Which was just Greek Yogurt cups and pancakes designed with berries of diverse colors.

“Now, before you kill me... We have successfully completed yet another level of our doomed project, and I assumed you'd like pancakes to go with this victory.”

Pyramus smiled at Jerome.

“You're lucky you're a good cook, or chef, or whatever annoying ass people who play old fucking music at 9:00 AM but justify themselves by being good at making breakfast are called ”, he said, before returning from whence he came.