Nuclear Time Waste Heroes

Naked Nuclear Waste Hero

NAKED NUCLEAR WASTE HERO

The sound is cars passing in front of your window at night as it rains a cold hard rain. Rain half frozen chilling us to the bone. Beneath us, tearing open our skin spilling blood being diluted by fallen water, is that yellow stripe in the middle of the road. Headlights instead of eyes glare holes through us. Car horns instead of shouting their vocal chords to ash.

The Death Junkies stand in wait for potential car crash victims. Excitement disguised as dread churn their stomachs inside out. Cars lurch forward in sudden TV channel surfing stops.

Our heads shoved into astronaut helmets breathing in filtered air like fish away from polluted water. When really we're hiding from impending concussions and skull fractures.

"They just fell out of the fucking sky."

People's heads pop out of moon roofs and windows, their necks craning the ten feet to meet our gaze, a third Cyclops eye in their hands record tire screeches and Fear and us. Vikko and Lee. These snapshots of time spread like the plague and some people will on point understand what it is we're doing but the number one rule on the Internet is:

Don't believe what you see on the Internet.

The rain trying to drown me out, I yell, "We're still safe if we leave right now."

Lee nods his head curtly as his hands deftly take the helmet off his head.

The reason we wear the space helmets is because the Time Jump would chuck us headfirst from the sky like astronauts cosplaying fallen angels. It was for this reason that we always emerged from the dead with green and purple skin. Lee always wondered why we never died from impact and I told him that maybe it was because it's the aftershock of Time Wasting.

"Maybe," He'd said. "But maybe it's just time bitch slapping us for fucking around with it."

Lee has always been resentful about being a Time Waster. He's been asking to go back since the beginning. His face shines blue and orange by arcade lights flashing so fast it could cause epileptic seizure. Neon beams of captured light line mirrors showing a thousand alternate reality versions of myself and Lee. Really it's a thousand imitations because in here with the light floods and the false immortality beings pulsing to the beat of simulated heartbeats, we're their Quantum Time Waste Heroes.

In the future we are the sound of God. Everyone wants to be a Universe Kid the way we all need drugs to function mindless behavior.

Out there, there are the anti-Vikkos and anti-Lees. Signs that scream at us that No, we can't play God. No, this store doesn't sell dingy blackwater coffee to Time Wasters. Fuck you Vikko. Fuck you Lee.

Through the traverses of Time we've found that love and hate are not opposites but the same except one is channeled negatively and the other positively. The opposite of love, of passion, is apathy. Not caring at all is the true evil. This is why the sympathy for the torturer and the hatred for the bystander with the passive passive face like empty time and black space in the background.

Lee cracks a grin at the Copy-and-Pastes emulating the we'd never left situation. The piercing on his tongue is rattling—clink, clink, clink—the sound of metal on teeth, on bone.

"They've forgotten what we look like," He says.

"They never even knew."

With numb death cold fingers my hands manage to pull out a crumpled pack of cigarettes that drip blood and water the way they expel cancer to lungs. I offer one to Lee. Cigarettes are our contingency plan for a short life. Collectively, our greatest fear is Time.