We could not see further in front of us than our hands. It was barely even navigable, and we hung onto each other as we avoided those certain people who ran throughout this strange pce. We were all completely silent, and I was sweating even despite the cooling attributes of being inside of a ground ying cloud. Will held onto me extra tightly, because he knew how stressful this was for me, as he was the only one out of the group who actually entered situations like this willingly. I sometimes entered these areas by accident, and I tried to get out of them as quickly as possible because I felt the people in those areas staring at me, even if there was no one around. I had the idea that the reason I felt this way was because I was racist, even though there was no evidence for it and I had actually been told by various people, Will included, that I was anti racist, and that felt very nice whenever they said it. I regretted that I felt both that way about the unfortunate people whose situation was not their fault, and I also regretted that I could not help them. It was a paradoxical conundrum, and the various opinions of other silent people did not help when it came to deciphering the puzzle.

  It didn’t matter now, though. If you’re about to die, your prejudices and fake opinions on factual statements don’t matter. You have to think back on your life and say if you’ve been a good person or not, say if you’ve hurt or helped, and generally been okay. I looked back and thought about all the bad things that I did, and I remembered all the people who had cried because of me and I started to cry as well. I didn’t know why I did those things, and I barely knew anything about myself now. That’s what my step-uncle said, anyway. I think he also said that I would never actually know myself, because he was still reading self help books at age sixty and I would do the exact same thing as him. It was so obvious to him that I never bothered to argue, especially because if I tried to say that he was making me feel bad, his wife and the rest of the family would step in and tell me, “Come on! Don’t say that!” And when I asked why, he would then say, “It’s a dad thing. Don’t worry about it.” But I worried about it so much that I cried at night when I was trying to sleep because I thought that I would never know anything.

  Will looked back at me, and I think he could tell that I was in a bad state, even though the mist. He stopped and grabbed my face and held it there for a moment in the cool light and breeze.

  “I promise that no harm will come to you. Do you understand? I don’t know what’s going through your mind, but I promise that it will not be as bad as what you are currently thinking.

  “Will?”

  “Yes, poor thing?”

  “You don’t usually talk this much.”

  “I’ve never seen you this bad before. I want to help you.”

  I began crying again, but this time because I was happy. I was happy because people cared about me and then I was sad because this wasn’t supposed to happen. I imagined myself being torn away from my friends into the sky because this wasn’t supposed to be happening, I’m not allowed to be happy, and I’m not allowed to question why. My family said so long ago that I was not allowed to enter the gated community of pleasure and hedonism, that I would be cast out into the cold and the rain forever. And that was okay by me, and actually that was how it should have been. This was how it was going to start, and my friends would be pulled away from me and I would be left shivering here forever. This was practically confirmed for me when I saw one of the illuminated figures cross close enough to us to see our group passing by. They stopped, and appeared to meld in with the mist, and then ran towards the house that they were closest to. I heard something topple over and an enormous crash, and then I heard the worst horror of all the horrors. A kxon started bring its unmistakable siren over the entire nd of mist. I saw more figures run out of their houses, and after catching sight of the first figure pointing and shouting towards us, I whispered in Will’s ear, “This is really happening, right?”

  “Yes. Start running. Now.”

  “Wait! Do we still hold on to each other?”

  “Shit. No. Everyone needs to do it for themselves.”

  I reyed that message to Audrey and Sarah, and then I let go of Audrey and Will’s hand and started running as fast as I could. Will was right beside me, and we were looking around to see if the people would try and kill us through some entirely unknown means. I conjured up thousands of ideas about how I would die in that pce. I thought that I would be stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake, pitchfork, fming torch, axe, battleaxe, bone, katana. I thought that I would be assimited into an organism a thousand miles wide, or even assimited into a happy society that wore the exact same things, ate the exact same things, and used robotics to handle the hard tasks like writing, music production, and painting. I wept for what I was now because I would no longer be.

  A figure threw himself at Will and I. He passed through us and carried his sword with him. I turned to Will and he said simply, “Ghost.”

  “They’re all ghosts?”

  “Yes.”

  “What? How are ghosts real?”

  “They aren’t.”

  “So, what? It’s just a group hallucination?”

  “No. I don’t know what it is, but ghosts are not real.”

  I then realized that Will did not actually have an expnation for what he was seeing, he just did not believe in anything supernatural. He was preternaturally equipped to believe in the logic of life, whereas I was unable to imagine anything other than absurdity. I had just seen people die in the thousands, naturally they were the ghosts we were currently seeing. It was such a simple leap for me to make that I could not believe that Will’s synapses could not fire in the way to make it make sense to him. But it was his previous experiences. I had seen unbelievable things for the majority of my life, either real or not, and he had only seen the brutality of the real world. We both understood each other, though. There was no point in arguing, it was simply that we hadn’t seen what we had each seen separately. Will had no desire to share. I had some desire. I had shared with him a few stories, one of which was the most terrible thing I had ever seen up until that point. I had seen a very feminine man murdered on camera for people’s sexual gratification. He had been completely naked, and then people had written horrible nguage all over his body, too awful to repeat. His penis was then held up, unnaturally small as it was, and then he was castrated with a knife. He did not scream. As he was bleeding, he was then made to step into a noose, and he was left bleeding for about two minutes. People were pointing and ughing and just talking as if this was an everyday occurrence. I thought I was going mad because I was the only one who seemed to care that he was being tortured to death. I saw his face as the chair was kicked out from under him. His eyes widened ever so slightly, and then a massive smile appeared on his face. I looked away as he lost oxygen. It took three minutes for him to die. I was then forced to look on as the people who watched with glee rolled out a grill and started chopping him into pieces. I don’t know why I couldn’t look away. I just couldn’t, even as they grilled him and started tearing into his flesh. The head was preserved uncooked because that’s how they wanted it.

  I imagined this thing as if it was happening right in front of me. I saw the ghosts move throughout this scene as well, and I just kept on running. I could no longer see Will or any of the others. I only saw ghosts and dead men. I ran through the ghosts in front of me, but I could not escape the demons of my past, the things that would never leave because they should never leave. I must remember them, as punishment for my crimes against humanity. I knew that the acts they performed on the man were consensual, at least in spirit. I knew not if he was mentally unwell or challenged in some way. I just didn’t understand why they had to do it in public. There were children watching, and they didn’t understand. Those peoples lives were probably ruined forever, and I am sure that at least six people were created as a result of that one event.

  When I tried to tell Will all of these things, he was incredulous. He could not believe that something like that could have happened, even though I tried to argue that he had seen much worse things throughout his life. He responded, “No. At worst, I’ve seen a dead body. Murdered, sure, but nothing even close to what that entailed.” Only when he saw the article in the news reted to the event did he believe me. At least he was receptive to reports. Most people weren’t. I still thought about that incident even years on. I couldn’t exactly say why, given that I was only a spectator. I thought it was because, in general, being a spectator is worse. You can yell and scream all you want but they will never listen, and those people certainly didn’t. I remembered that a woman yelled out for them to stop, and the torturers simply stared and went back to their work. It was like they hadn’t even heard them at all. I did not know what to think of the woman, but she seemed to be very well put together, and I felt bad for her, because this was probably the first terrible thing she had seen in her life.

  The st thing I remember from that incident was the woman talking to me. All my life I was a very approachable person, which I had tried to mitigate in certain ways, but it had never worked. The woman first said, “Poor thing, you don’t need to see this. Come on.”

  “I’m eighteen.”

  She seemed truly shocked at that, because I had always seemed much younger than I actually was, as I was malnourished as a child.

  “Well, still, you’re too young to see this. Come on.”

  “Aren’t you too rich to see this?”

  “Oh, fuck you! I will not have a street urchin insult me on the basis of my wealth, I am a good outstanding citizen and…”

  She went on for a good ten minutes. I sat there, because it was funny to listen to her shout. I remember the stares from the actual street urchins who wished they could be me, let alone her.