The stories were rolled out, like a long, silken scroll, like a long cigarillo waiting to be smoked by undying mouths that constantly ached for the death for their lungs and their tar-filled brain. Sonic had typed the pages with his speedy, agile, godlike fingers, and Miles had drawn out all the monsters, all the apparitions the raven sees on his flight across Seattle, where the world was as dead and as lonely as him. Sonic never seemed to enjoy drinking coffee as much as he did now, as the little fox used his parents old coffee machine, the grittiness of the coffee beans satisfying his teeth, his ghastly tongue, how rocky it tasted to his throat, how it filled his soul with energy! The coffee had soothed him on this seemingly warm night, the sun turning over its rose petals, the hands careening towards Miles' body, patting him, and he could smell the scent of winter in his nose, as it seemed to ebb away like the waves in Seattle, the dragon crying for food to be brought out to it. The typing seemed to come so quick, with his brother's quick thoughts and Tails's smooth quick strokes of his hands on his watercolors. The beasts had looked amiable in their horror, with their raking claws, their bug-eyed faces and their worn bodies, full of cracks and seepages of blood. Had Sonic known that he would be a writing genius, with his cigarette staunch in the air, swishing around like a blue wavy hand of stench, his teeth flashing so brightly against the lamplight. The god never tired of the typewriter, as he listened to his brother's tale, and his brother's heart was glad, the sun was yellow, not black as it had been inside his life, and they had laughed, enjoyed each other's company, had taught the others that suicide was never an option. Especially for young Sonic, who once tried to kill himself in the sea dragon's womb, and Miles, who thought about hanging himself, after the Slave and the Queen had been stabbed to the wall like pig hocks. The fingers were on fire, as he typed out all his brother's holy words, his sacrosanct tellings of the raven, the one who had always flew off to find shelter from the rain of men's woes and their organs and limbs raining from the sky, God's punishment to the humans for being so sinful, so blind, so deaf, so dumb, and so colorless in the world's vivid paintings. They brought the colors of the world down, with their white skin, their black skin, they were all sick in their terribly wretched ways, and as the words melted into the page, as Sonic continued to type, he began to feel a certain sickness in his brother, his cystic fibrosis beginning to overtake him, and his mind, his weak, gray mind that once was full of colors from his bipolar, his thoughts had turned gray, black, pitiless, full of din and misery and misfortune and catalysicism.

The words had bled from his thoughts. They had turned so black, so rotten, so vile, with the negativity they had contained. They had bled off his fingers. They were his own creations, his own sheddings of blood, the pen and the typewriter the drainers of his blood, but the black blood that had always taken those in depression in the Middle Ages, it couldn't be opened, not the opening of his hellish and holish thumb, to make it spurt, make it bleed with more ink that he needed to dot the end of his sentences, to add a dash after a pause or a separation, and two dots, a dot and a dash, a straight dash, a pointed tail that was struck by lightning, a curled tail that always asked questions, and so many marks, so many lives he spilled from the gods he killed back in his past! The cynicism, the pain, the sorrow that he often felt as the rain had bled open God's eyes, his tears falling to the ground, as the first rain of February had happened after a cold, bitter winter, the first calling of Spring. The first calling of God giving birth to Spring from His womb to live yet another few months, before it had to be torn away in the blood and rancor of the leaves that had murdered His long green ladies, that had told many to dance, that had told many to kill themselves, to die and be diseased with the rest of the leaves that once were silent murderers, as the winter had come with her white cold dress and had sheeted the rest of the world in hate and death. The black moments had no longer lived, breathed its last breath, but now, the trees were becoming alive, and beginning to bloom at their very fingertips.

But yet he, his brother, art thou in heaven, wanted to die again and be again in heaven. Or in Hell. Where he believed he truly belonged.

The typewriter had become his piano, as he touched upon its ivory keys, and played yet another sad song for those other gods he killed, ones who couldn't understand how wonderful the arts were. Painting, drawing, writing, singing, they were the only things that kept people alive. If the arts merely had never existed, humanity would've committed suicide and became extinct, long ago. Because everyone, as the Mad Hatter had said, was truly, truly mad. But some of the best people, like his brother, were geniuses.

He remembered the wine glasses his mother had drunk once in a while, in celebration that her son had written yet another 1,000 words, or yet another completed short story. He had drunk some of those wine glasses while he took his medicine. Both his cystic fibrosis medication, and his mood stabilizer. He experienced mania more often, so he was prescribed Trileptal to ease his bipolar.

Wind had sworn, the more he drank his wine and taken the Trileptal, the madder he became! The more his words had come to life, the more his worlds seemed real! So he kept taking the meds. They were his own little ignitions to creativity, the spark that started a raging fire, the flames that soon burnt out a story. And all had seemed so brilliant in the eyes of God, and he kept worsening his health, his mental health, more and more and more…

Wind couldn't tell his brother the main reason he lost the battle to cystic fibrosis was because his Trileptal had made it worse. It gave him so much vivacity in his work, so much passion, so much color. He drank even three tall glasses of his mother's wine, more of his father's sherry, and he soon was intoxicated by his own words, his own languor of his spirit. He never told his doctor, his family, anyone that he was making himself his own tonic of self-destruction. Because deeply, like Miles, he wanted to die too, to become a martyr.

He prayed that he had a bottle of wine with him, the Trileptal that made him so mad and so alive, as everything else, illness notwithstanding, had made him sick to the bone of life. Mania fueled him. The depression had given him new songs to write about. And he was experiencing a depressive symptom, that his life had grown black, the red curtains in Miles' room had grown thicker and were curled like pubic hairs, and as he told Sonic to stop typing, he cried, and told his brother that he wished he was a god again, so he could live without his illness, when in reality, he embraced his illness, and wished it would make him die even quicker. Sonic loved his little brother. Loved him more than anything. Don't cry don't cry, he said. All the pain will wash away.

"No…It won't be okay. It never will be okay. I have a secret to tell you brother. A secret that will rattle your skull and shake your brain. Your own little mental earthquake. I have so many secrets to tell you. I have so many lies, so many mistruths, to tell you as well. You are dying, and you will be alive again. I am dying, more than I ever have before. I am dying, and you can't do anything about it this time brother. I am dying, and I am dying."

Veinous, heinous creature, he lashed out! Disgusting creature that had risen from the sun, that had seen the death of each day, had seen the new placenta fire in the sky, had seen God watch over his blind people, his blind prophets, and you, with your candlestick, with your blue smoke that had dissipated over the rocky moon, do you realize how much madness, how much sorrow, lies in the bipolar disease?

Sonic knew very little about bipolar. He only knew that Wind once took a medication for it. He died before it could take full effect.

"It didn't work," he said. "It never worked. It just gave more fire to roast my words in. To make them burn and sear off the page, off the reader's eyes. The Trileptal gave me godlike abilities, don't you see, do all of you see?"

"I can draw with passion again!" Miles cried.

Sonic couldn't pay attention to him. His brother became a snarling, decrepit beast, and he watched as his slit eye turned over the pages, and his sorrow, his doubt, he ripped them, tore them, and had said they were nothing, that the words didn't burn, they didn't fight and sneer, they didn't cry and laugh and play games, they were words that were bleached, albicant, white, as white as the white man's skin, and he turned over the next page and ordered Sonic to write.

"Sonic, look at how these monsters come to life!" Miles said.

"But your words were really good brother, you don't need to rewrite all of this…"

"I have to! Write, and follow my voice! Don't make one mistake! This is important!"

He sobbed as he wrote (he was believing it was from someone else, and not him…someone who was taking over his body, possessing him…), and again, his brother raked the page out of the typewriter and threw it in the wastebasket, as he cried, cried, that he was nothing but a low life, a terrible writer, and that nothing could ever absolve him.

"I will always be a failure. I never wrote anything good. All those short stories I gave to my grandparents? They threw them away. They didn't like them at all. The stories I gave to mom? She threw them away, and father did too, and you…"

"That's not true! Mom kept all your stories! She celebrated you more than she did with me! She only threw me four birthday parties, and she always celebrated when you wrote 5,000 words. After my fourth birthday, she forgot about me. She only cared about you. If it's anyone that should be crying about how they're useless, it should be me!"
"You threw away that copy of the story, big bro! You never visited me when I was sick, except when I was about to die. And now suddenly you're mournful. You tell me you don't like hospitals. You tell me you can't stand doctors. You tell me you love me, you love my stories, that we're a team, but God, you sicken me, big bro. Killing yourself. Becoming a god. Did you think that would solve your problems? I became a god, and I died and I was soon forgotten in history until you revived me. Anansi made stories that no one can remember, because his web was weak, his web was full of lies and slander. And you tell me I can become a great writer. Many of us don't become a great writer by just writing. We write a million stories, a million short stories, a million novels, a million novellas, a million pages, a million words, we can only become godlike by writing as much as a million words, and I only wrote short stories. I never wrote anything good in my entire life. I'm no Harper Lee. I can't just write one book and become famous and decide to never write for the rest of my life. I envy you, because you don't need to be a writer to validate yourself. You're an ignorant fool. You're an ignorant fool like girls, as Daisy had said in The Great Gatsby. A fool. You decide to validate yourself by becoming an inch of a god, by becoming a little godlike. Well, I am someone you know Sonic, someone you should know well enough, and I envy you and I pity you, because you're using all of your life to be nothing but a big joke and you're trying to waste it. Jokes are good. They keep society alive. Without blind, deaf, and dumb people, how do we know if the brilliant are brilliant, the creative are creative, how do we get dumbasses to do simple menial jobs that no one else wants to do? Because they can't do anything else of worship. And you my big brother, my friend, my devout believer, this is time we said goodbye. This is time you try to do your godlike duties by yourself without me. Depression is a long, voracious snake that will devour you and digest all your bones along with your body. It will kill you. It's killing me from the inside. Inside me that snake is eating my heart. Eating it whole. And my lungs. And my brain. Depression, Sonic. Depression. All great writers had suffered from a mental illness. Did you know that? Plath suffered from bipolar. Hemingway was bipolar. Vonnegut was schizophrenic. Fitzgerald and Bukowski were alcoholics. Anne Sexton could've possibly had schizoaffective, you never know with that crazy bitch. I am one of them, Sonic. I am the god among writers. I am mentally unfit, I am physically unfit, and you and your family are nothing but fools. It is time to extinguish my flame. It is time to distinguish the hacks from the hocks, the gods from the dogs, the golds from the bronze."

Silence. He expected yet another finale to the speech. Wind was not acting himself. He was a fool, a bigger fool than himself, and he couldn't make a string of sense from him, as the threads of his mouth continued to be not sewn, the wires placating, surrounding him.

"I'm getting rid of myself, Sonic. Suicide is the only answer to becoming godlike in people's lives when you're nothing but a piece of shit like ourselves. Miles, do you have a gun? Can I drown? Can I electrocute? Can I overmedicate? Can I navigate to jump off a cliff? You've got some scalpels, give me those scalpels."

"I don't want to die anymore!" Miles shouted.

He took the scalpels.

"Plunge these into me," he said.

Sonic's hands shook. He held the scalpel in the air, like a stake to a crucifix, and he told him that he couldn't kill him, he couldn't kill himself.

"You don't believe me, do you," he said.

"No, I believe in you perfectly well." He laid the scalpel down, as if it was a tender heart to take care of, a little baby heart that his brother had always had since he was little, but the scalpel had claws, it had to kill him, it had to thirst for blood.

His cheek tingled. He could feel the threads of the universe beginning to unravel.

"Kill me Sonic. Just kill me. Kill me or I will kill you."

Miles had stopped painting with his watercolors and had stopped drawing with his grade school pencils, and he watched as the monster had risen from his seat, as the scalpel held was lifted in the air, the cross that would oxidize him in holy fire.

"Kill me Sonic. I have to die. You know that."

"I…" His throat closed in. The hand continued to shake. The depression that once feasted on Wind's body had began to devour him as well. And he couldn't move. He was immobilized by the snake's thick wrap of its scaly body.

"Kill me," he said. He fell to the floor, his hands covering his eyes, blind, deaf, dumb, and he saw as the morning was born, pursed through the sky's gaping hole, and he couldn't think of a more deadly time to die. At the time a new day is born and still juiced with placenta.

"Kill me."

His father had said the same thing to him a long time ago. His father was committed in a psych ward for only a month, and he came back to haunt their lives. He wished his father was really dead, even if the memories of him were warm, like baked bread.

"Kill me."

His mother forgot about him. Once he was five he was forgotten. His mother always gave Wind a nice hearty breakfast and she gave Sonic a bowl of cereal that had been on top of the fridge for months, even a year. Wind had no job except writing. Wind didn't even went to school on account of his health. Sonic went to school, and always got Ds and Fs because his mother had wronged him. Had always hated him.

"Kill me."

His father chose Wind as his favorite too. Wind was always a weak child, and he felt sorry for him. He criticized Sonic often. In his later years he soon forego the alphabet for gibberish and symbols and paranoid theories. His father was nothing but an ape, because mental illness ran in the family.

"Kill me."

Bipolar.

"Kill me."

Schizophrenia.

"Kill me."

He wondered if he had some of that worm of illness too.

The scalpel had scrapped some of the blood of the top of his hand. It was his new pen. He was writing a delicate letter to him in scrawled handwriting.

His letters had oozed ink.

"You're making me bleed as a writer. Is that it? Are you going to follow Hemingway's advice and make me bleed? I'd rather die than bleed. I'd rather die than make any more shitty stories!"

"Writing is your passion, brother," he said, as a novel began to be carved from his wrists, as a novella began to form from his eyes, as an epic was written from his crotch, as the Bible had been written from his forehead.

The words bled, bled, bled, and bled out, a sea of black.

"Miles…"

Miles looked at him, as the ink continued to spill from his lacerated wounds, as he saw the sorrow, the pain, the torture of suicide, of being a miserable martyr.

"Give me help. If you don't dress my wounds, I'm going to die in your room, with so many words spilled."

Miles waddled through the black sea, as he looked in the bathroom for gauze, bandages, and he tried to remember how to make a tourniquet. Such a small fox couldn't save someone from such fierce bleeding, could he? He would rather have him die as he tried rather than not help him at all.

The ink stained his legs.

He took the gauze and wrapped it around, around his body, like a white cloth snake that only wanted to heal the wounds of the pitied and the star-mourning.

The Queen and the Slave never checked on him. They never appeared as the ink flowed to the basement. Many words had surrounded them, but yet they were too blind to see.

Sonic was mummified, his smaragdine eyes able to see the sun as it gave birth to birds, to the dew in the grass, to the leaves in the trees, and he soaked up the sunlight, as much as he could, as the words were left out to dry by the typewriter's ink, like finished acrylic and watercolor paintings.

He never wished to be more alive than this moment, right now, just gazing at that sun and seeing God's face smiling at him.