He was locked in the closet, and his uncle had thrown away the key. And the only people he could talk to inside his own world were the shadows, the shadows that had dubbed him Shadow, and of the world around them Of Shadows. His uncle realized his boy had a particular gift, and he had tried to scare it off him, with the use of his blenders, his garbage disposals, his remains of his mother's legs dangling from the fridge above him, as he had laid out dinner after dinner, of his parent's bodies, like sacrifices to Aztec gods, their small ornate red blood ready to be licked with their ornate tongues. His Uncle was a savage, a savage animal that never knew eating humans was taboo, especially family members, when the weather wasn't cold and his lights were still working.

"Time to eat!" he said. And he laughed, a croaked, salty laugh as salty as the sea in Seattle. He had watched the ocean undulate its tongue over the silver valleys, and he wondered if there truly were dragons there, ones that had lived on goldenrod flowers and fed emeralds to keep alive. His father had told him stories of myths in the world, including the gods that had lived in Seattle, including Chip, and the new god that had rested its sleepy, milky eyes as he was carried from his mother's womb to Sonic's lap and played with him many games that he could understand, a secret language built between the two brothers, and his name was Wind, and his mother thought great things were in store for him.

He didn't know why he already knew about Wind. The shadows had told him of a new god. He had told his uncle of the new birthed Christ, and he had only resorted back to his dollar bill pinching, putting the money on the walls. He wasn't sure why his uncle had done this, but he accepted it, as the walls had spilled of hard liquor and blood, of iodine and cum. He was afraid, but had learned to keep his fear inside. His quivering muscles only showed the pain he had. His uncle knew about the heart he kept inside himself. And he wanted it, raw and still beating. He had tried to hide all signs of being alive to him. As soon as he saw Uncle Death, his breath smelling of parsnips and radishes that had lied sleeping in the earth for so long, as soon as his parents were dead, he was dead too, but still a walking corpse.

The shadows kept him company. They had told him stories of other gods in the air, other gods that had wanted to meet him. They had asked him if he wanted to be a raven when he grew up. And he said yes. Ravens were nice birds. They plucked eyeballs from dead people and had eaten the tissues and jerky of deers crushed by cars. They had talked in quiet, shallow voices, and their wings were the shining piece of the night sky before the moon had taken its place. They told him he stole the moon from the king and he had placed the stars next to it as garland. The sun was the right golden eye of God, and the moon was his left silver one. His hands were stars and clouds. His other extremities weren't shown, because only hands and eyes should you see of a god, but no other part, not even the foot that had pedaled the potterymaking wheel as he shaped his animals and people, and not his fingernails as he got them grimy and gray and nearly crushed by the pin roller as he made his jeweled eyes, and he had also made every star in the sky of an opalescent piece to be worn as jewelry by him, and the sea was his emeralds, his sapphires, his amethysts, his garnets and his rubies, and the actual jewels themselves were remnants of the sky and sea, the fingernails and stars and eyes of God. He had delighted in these stories, had asked them to tell them to him over and over, as he loved to hear about gods, just like Daddy had. And Daddy would always tell him a good story before his bedtime.

His uncle never told him bedtime stories, or even gave him good meals, or compliments, or even a genial glance. He hated him. He scraped him with his wicked nails, he had cut him delicately with razors back from the 50s, he had pulled on his quills and had claimed to make elixirs from his badness, his foulness, his evilness. The man had lined up the entire house with dollar bills, and nothing else had been on the wall, save for one picture of the man's dog, named Artemis. The dog had been dead for 22 years. He accidentally ran over it one day, and he had still cried about it ever since.

His uncle was very sick, so he sympathized with him sometimes (sometimes, he still was a crooked old bastard with the breath of vomit and parsley and had eaten nothing but meat and his favorite vegetable, turnips. He ate turnips every other day, and had always thrown them up.). He was considered schizophrenic. Shadow had only sympathized with him when he was a small child, but now had found himself wishing he was dead and his corpse deserved the same treatment as his mother and father, ground up, served with dog and rat food, and fed to him. But when he still had the love of his parents remaining in his heart, he knew about how his uncle would die very soon, in a pool of his own feces and urine. His mother and father who had tried to help him.

He had told him to never go in the basement. Never go in the basement, he said. I have experiments. Things that will benefit mankind. He often heard the screams of women inside. He wasn't sure if he was killing more of them. But he had to say nothing, and keep his eyes shut, in the shadows and contours of his closet, while the shadows had spoken to him. They said his uncle would soon be caught, and given the worst death inhumanely possible. And he was reassured of this, but never saw it. The shadows had only told him convenient lies to set his heart at peace. Such a small, fragile child couldn't concern himself with cannibalism and mental illness. Foreign concepts to nymph ears, little six-year-old eyes, but his eyes the color of iodine and blood, he listened to the shadows whisper, and he heard his uncle stomp in the stairs above him, collecting his vials of semen in a fridge above. Why did he do this? The shadows told him to not concern himself. Too small, too prying…

The man was a friend to many people over the Internet. He was called "NocturnusTheorist" on forums, believing that the government had implanted him with lies. That they gave him eyes that wouldn't see how the world truly was, that these hallucinations were truly the creatures that were meant to be seen in this world. He had hung dead cat tails in his room. Black. As soft as reeds near a pond, drifting away and touching the sky with their furry bodies. He claimed that cats were the animals that had told the most lies. Their pink rough sandpapered tongues had kept flickering fiery stories for the world to swallow, and the cat had gasped, and he had told the man that the world was such a lie, how big and how blue it was, diaphanous angels have come and sheltered the world in sapphires and azurites and pieces of cornflower. The Uncle, his fat chest rolling off like waves back at Seattle, the fat bastard boasting over mouthfuls of human carcasses, he soon couldn't eat his meals anymore of his imprisoned women, and he had touched the face of Shadow with his bloody, rustic hands, and he had asked him if he wanted to see his dead dog, Artemis, rotting in the fetid ground before him. The only creature that cared about him.

Shadow had wished to saw off his head, even if he was so young, so small and so fleshed and so blessed.

Feeling sorry for him didn't make him any better. The child had wished for guns, to strike off his head like a match, set it on fire, blazing with blood. The Uncle smelled of rotting roses and of dead meat. He had smelled of Death itself. The Uncle had dug up his dog for him to see, his teeth still visible in his skeleton when he was an old coot of a mangy mutt.

"That's a…nice dog, Uncle."

"It soore is. His teeth kept away the nightmares."

He was a Hellhound, he explained.

"A Hellhound that kept away the demons. That had kept away your mother from seeing your father. Not until I sliced off their arms. 'Dere was some good blood in 'dere. Blending dem. Yeah, your father was a good man. Until I blended his body and made it into food for you. You got your father in you, soore you do!"

His fist clenched tightly, a baby muscle that is just pink and tender being pulled to restrain him from killing him.

Why didn't he?

He wasn't sure.

He had connections to the gods, the shadows had said.

Chip had said he killed people who had bits of the devil inside of them. Apparently they were also inside his mother and father, and the man could sense deep-seated hatred in some people. When he saw any of the Seven Deadly Sins in any of them, he had murdered them, while dressing blenders with their blood and meat, and feeding his rats, his colony of rats that he held inside, had made experiments with, and his cruelty, so unrelenting, he had conducted experiments on Shadow too, as he held the syringe in one of his flesh-puttied hands.

"Time to get your shot!" he said, with teeth that were gray and decomposing. His Uncle was Death himself.

Shadow had wanted to stay locked up in the closet, as the shadows had told him it was cyanide.

"My Uncle is Death," he said.

"He is a god."

"He is a schizophrenic god."

"I wished he wasn't here anymore."

Silence. He no longer heard footsteps. His mind had silenced him, as his uncle struggled with telling him, his hand still holding the cyanide needle firmly in his grasp, that he once loved him, when he was such a small babe.

"Soore, a small babe, listening to the waves of the ocean, while you were suckling at your mama's teat. Soore, your father watching over you, in his damn dapper suit and tie, looking like he was all dressed up on a hellfire as soore date. You looked at your mama's eyes and you asked why Uncle Aloysius didn't come and visit you no more. Your mouth still full of your mama's milk, even. She said, she said your uncle is sick, soore, he's sick with a disease you ain't gonna understand. And I always damn well wanted to see you Shadow, and now you're here, you drive me damn near balls to the wall. You with your…I don't know the hell ain't right with ya, but you're going to be as sick as me. Illness spreads, like a virus, soore, and soon you'll be like me. I'm just givin' ya the dose of your medicine that will make you go to a better place, yeah won't that smart like a bitch, Istu. You goddamn hollerin' red skin. Father was a damn red skin and I never did like him."

Shadow closed his eyes, and tried to forget The Uncle's words. They rolled off his tongue like venom. And he believed he could remember his mother and father if he tried, but he could only remember his father's stories, and his last tale about the Trail of Tears, a slow, lethal, and agonizing execution that began in this very country, back when such things were apparently all right. Presidents had hated their kind because they had spoken in a language they never cared to understand, had taken lands where they wanted establishments, their McDonald's and Wells Fargo's and golf courses. His father once remarked at least if he wanted to go to college he had some benefits to being an Indian.

He told him stories about the raven, on how he stole the sun and moon and stars away from little Shadow himself, and he laughed when he asked if it was true, and he said, "Only if you truly believe it is," as he took a long draught of Budweiser. "Such things can only become real if you put any ounce of truth in them. And Istu, there is some truth to the story. Ravens are truly tricksters, and they can tell us a lot of things in this world. They are smarter than what white men give them credit for. And someday soon Istu, I think the truth of the world will be laid out to you in open hands, if you let yourself be open to them. Block out and doubt everything, and not believing in a single damn thing you might as well be dead."

His father was never a sentimental man. He never tucked himself in. He never made dinner and lunch and breakfast for him. Shadow was always expected to do those things himself. And he didn't mind. It made him believe he was an independent and strong child, just like his mother had always wanted him to be.

His mother, with her golden quills, her blue eyes that were the color of azurites, she had such beautiful white hands that she often lifted Shadow's head with, had whispered at him to look at her, and she planted a gentle, soft kiss on top of his head. Her hands often sidled away, conjoined together, and he wished he could remember his mother's kisses so well, when she soon tried to get help for his uncle on his father's side of the family, as he ranted and raved about the cats that had foretold the future, and how the government planted microchips in his eyes. She never knew the severity of the situation oh no, not his sweet mother, not his candy-coated mother art thou in heaven, who only tried to help him, oh his sweet mother, where she hoped her son was okay, and not at all in a place she couldn't make sense of to get him out.

The room was quiet, even the air was stifled, as his uncle waited for him to get out of the closet. He would be hungry and wantin' to piss soon, he said. He would be out before y'alls knows it, he said to no one in particular.

The shadows told him to go to the basement. It was the only way out of his uncle's psychosis. He believed the walls were talking to him, his dog had spoken to him and said to kill Shadow, kill any remnant of the family, the fucking red skins.

A little girl had screamed into the curdled milk of the moon, the breasts ready for him to suckle and be out of this nightmare. He just wanted his mother and father back.

"Come on Shadow, this will be a nice treat for ya!"

He was picked up by his large, slab of a hand, and the needle was close to his black, billowing skin, the needle getting closer, closer…

The shadows had told him to defend himself. To hit him. To run. To run far away from this awful, disgusting, loony god, and hope that Aceso would be safe.

Shadow's hands were so small, literally baby-knifed fingers. He had cut up his Uncle's eye, the eye that looked so still and lazy. Cried, cried, hark hark! said the man with the glass rimmed eye, the man with the turnips oozing from his breath, the man with his hands fisted like little hams as he held the cyanide needle not so delicately (almost injecting himself with it), and he dropped the needle on the ground, his large meaty fingers looking for the syringe that had contained the secret to dying, the secret to living a good life in heaven…

The god must die! he claimed. He believed the crowbar near the glaring light of the moon would be enough to kill him. Kill him for killing his own life. The man who had taken away his joy and happiness. The crowbar was full of orange, peeling rust, and he had lifted it, the Uncle taking the syringe, the side of it being held like a blade, ready to stab the hoglet that had once called him "A nice man" when he was with his father, his father that he so fucking despised with his money, his Greed, his Sloth, his Pride, his Gluttony! His land that he never got to share when he lived in a trailer full of trash! His brother never cared, and only left him to rot in his lonesome house, as when he killed his precious dear not so Navajo wife, he came in expecting to find her, but instead had found her in a puddle of blood, her arms and legs detached, as Death drove the cyanide needle into his heart…

His eyes switched to the sounds of screams piling from the basement. It had smelled of piss and blood and shit. He wasn't sure who Aceso was, but she had screamed so loud, a rabbit howling into the cold confines of the mother moon, wishing for her mother to come back to her, to feed her brown mouth, to feed her with thread and yarn.

What the hell did he do in there? Shadow had thought. It smells even worse than the rest of the house. There's blood on the walls. More dollar bills. Women and little girls screaming. God screaming. A god is screaming down there. Death had wanted to keep the folklore to himself.

He had latched onto his Uncle's head with the crowbar, plunging the metal deep inside his skull, enough for his brain to bleed. The man was choking on his own blood, even throwing up as his Uncle had always had digestive problems from eating beets and radishes along with horse meat for most of his life (or so he thought), and he had decided to kill his Uncle, for his many years of torturing him, for his many years of keeping him away from the rest of his world, from his mother and father that had always loved him, from having a peaceful life away from this god bullshit. Shadow had always attributed that he was Yehl from his Uncle. His Uncle had got him hooked to the god life. His needle had given him the junk, the heroin, that had made him into what he was today, a despicable creature known as the raven.

Yehl…

The shadows were speaking. They had told him the sun would not last longer, the world would soon be turned against the moon, the blackness was coming to cover them all with a thick velvet blanket aligned with jewels, and his Uncle had lied brain-damaged, his eye damaged, and his hands reaching out for him, to choke him, as the needle was now on the floor, ignored.

The cyanide had begged for him.

But the shadows had told him to wait. He would get his punishment. From God Himself, as He kept screaming on the horrors that was inside the basement.

He had entered, the dollar bills melting into obscurity. He heard more screams pierce his ears. The women were naked, their breasts stained with cum, as they had told the young boy to run, and to let them free, to call the authorities.

They were so frail, their bones visible on their bodies. Their ribcages were so prominent, like little birdcages that had trapped canaries in their throats. Their hair was a coarse tangled web. Many women had lain dead, their bodies ripped up, never doing anything with them. His Uncle was a very sick man, a sick man he could no longer sympathize with (no longer a bit).

He had killed many people.

The rabbit girl was in a cage of rats, in a chamber that his Uncle had devised himself, and her brown chocolate mouth was lined with grisly blood. She had asked him to take her away from this hell, but she had remained calm, as the rats had chewed on the cuticles of her nails.

"Do you have a phone mister?"

He shook his head. "No. I lived without a phone for many years. My uncle thought they only brought the government to his house. He's still alive up there. The shadows had told me not to kill him, but he's belligerent. I smashed his skull. He's going to be able to see and kill me in here along with the rest of you. I don't know how we're going to get out of here."

Her insides hurt, with the man grinding into her. She held a shiny red pen, made from the finest rubies in Zanzibar, with silver made from mercury that is bound to make anyone sick with bipolar, and she had told him, "Make a contract."

"A contract? How is that going to help?"

She stared into him listlessly, her pain too much. Once he signed the contract, she would forget all about this chamber, oh sweet God in heaven, oh Lord Jesus and his shining chariot.

"It is the contract to become a god, Shadow." No shock at knowing his name. The shadows must've told her. "Make a wish, and this will all be over. These women will get to go home. You can turn invisible and fly away from this awful man. I will forget about you, until many years later, as the shadows had foretold. I can talk to shadows too, Shadow. You are the king of the shadows, and they have blessed us with seeing the truth of the world, the absolute resolute darkness. The truth about your uncle is that he is a very diseased man, and he will continue to commit his heinous crimes, until years later when he is captured by the police, and he is given a lethal injection, along with the police deciding to not bury him and put his body in a wood chipper (it was definitely illegal to do that, she said, but the police got away with it, and no one at all cared that was what happened to your dear sweet uncle). He will die without regrets to what he did. The truth is that your uncle is a god. A god who is killing other gods for his own gain. I am a god too, Shadow. My name is Aceso, the god of healing."

"Why can't you heal your own wounds if you're the god of healing? Should you be using your powers to get out of here and not have me become a god? What if this whole thing is risky? What if I become a disgusting man like my uncle? If that's the result, I can't be doing this. I can't be like my uncle. I can't have my life murdered before me all over again."

"He knows my real name," she said without pain, without pity and without joy. "My name is Cream. Once you learn the name of a god, their powers are gone, except for the one lone god in the sky. He can do anything."

She paused, as she could feel the rats climbing on her shit-stained dress. She coughed, the air fetid, with the ripe smell of bodies and rat feces, and her eyes soon lit up, as she bore into Shadow's own irises, his blood beginning to flood his eyes.

"The New Christ. The New Bringer of the New World. This world will die soon, and you will be the one to bring The New Christ to the New World. You will learn this one day. I hope. I truly do hope."

Chip had emerged from the red-hot tongue of the room, the mauve chipmunk with the tail of a rabbit. Shadow had heard about the timekeeper from the shadows, a creature that made sure time runs in a fluid line from its ink pen, and upon looking at his innocuous face, he didn't trust him. He had secrets inside his fur, his flesh, and he could tell that he was the devil himself, as his form soon dissolved, becoming a hedgehog like him, except the bloody streaks were teal, as teal as the sea on a clear Seattle day, if those days had ever existed in such a rainy place as Seattle.

His eyes were slit, reptilian, and he could tell his body and heart were nothing but crystals. He didn't care for him or Cream. He just simply needed more sacrifices for this war of gods. And Shadow's uncle had pledged his life to him, and he thought it was a delicious life, even though his uncle was a hideous disfigured creature.

He smiled an opalescent smirk, his jaws so glacial in the light, and he made him sign the contract, on the terms that Cream and these ladies were never captured, and the moment would soon be forgotten, except for how they became gods.

"Cream is a very valuable god. She threads time into its seams. She is my servant to keeping time flow confluent and consistent. She is my favorite god, but go against my wishes about my time, foolish god, and I shall make sure your god life is full of misery. I can already tell we might not get along. I hate ravens. Disgusting birds, eating carrion and dead bodies. You'll just be like your goddamn uncle. Eating the remains of your father and mother. I'm sure her tits tasted good, didn't they Shadow?"

Shadow had swung his fist at his glassy face, but the memory was erased from his line of time before the punch connected. He could see his wicked grin as he told him the truth that the gamy horse meat was actually his mother.

He could see the scissors align themselves before the lone thread of time, as the event of him being raised by his uncle when he was about 6, was snipped and torn away like a burst vein, a slit artery, and although he could remember Chip and Cream slightly, the event never happened. Chip soon had said nothing of the event, and he never remembered an uncle in his life who was diseased and so severely disabled that he barely got by with his SSI and Medicaid.

He found himself back in the present. The shadows had showed him of what remained of the cut line of time in that other life he led. It still existed, it was still inside the computer's data, but it was dead, and no longer applicable. The shadows told him his uncle was dead, but he never was with him. Chip never filled in the lines from when he was about 6 years old. But the shadows told him they could help him remember his parents from when he was a baby to 5 years old. 6? The number never existed. Shadow became an adult after 5. Satan didn't find the details of the rest of his childhood necessary to fill out. His memory was ripped from him, God had taken his starry hands and had ripped the memories from his brain and left a white, empty void inside. He had taken the memories and ate them. And they soon were no longer part of the mainframe of this great big computer God had. It was deleted, cleared out of the Recycle Bin, replaced with many 0's. The memory died, without a scream.

He could still remember that his mother was dead, but from what, he wasn't sure. He never heard of his uncle or Death, but soon heard in the news that a schizophrenic man was arrested and on death row. Mental illness or no, they let him rot in jail for years before he was given the shot.

He looked familiar, but he wasn't so sure. He had a beard and red streaks, and was a hedgehog all right, with hammy fists and a glass eye and the police wrote that his breath smelled of "decayed meat and decayed turnips and radishes".

Such a flawed, misunderstood creature. What made him so crazy to lock a bunch of women in his house and rape and torture them? Along with the dollar bills that stuck on the red walls…a very sick man. Very sick. And what a pity it was, that mentally ill people were defined by men like him in the media.

His mother had always picked oleanders for her garden on the reservation (if the government had allowed such a thing), and he always remembered them in black tall vases near the walls, and she told him they were her favorite flowers. He could feel his mother still inside his heart, dying the more he did his godly duties. There was still a piece of his mother inside him, he could feel her heartbeat resonate with his, and he wanted her to claw out of her chest and come to life and let him die as she would rock him and his torn body and send him to sleep as the shadows had gathered around him and had told him to eat the flowers, as the truth will become more apparent in his eyes without all this darkness.

They told him he would remember everything about his mother and father, including the hidden relationship they all had with each other. He always thought on how strange it was, that his father and mother were rarely together, yet they seemed to still love each other, as if their heartbeats were on, and would continue beating as loudly as a shout or yell or siren many miles away.

The oleanders that had been laid by somebody. There was a reason these flowers were here. He could sense Morrigan was not far, he was getting close to the cemetery.

He could see her small purple body, on her knees, crying over a radiant white lotus flower. Her tears had soiled the earth and had grown the oleanders and gleaming wired plants that looked as if they belonged in an art museum by some fancy New York artist, who might as well had been an investor in firms, something said. A multi-talented artist. How strange things had worked that way what seemed to be many miles away to the city of kings.

He gently lifted the flowers off the ground as if they were fragile children, made of glass, ready to be carried by their mother and into a happy childhood, as he swallowed the oleander whole, with no ill effects from the poison. He could feel the heart along with his beat more rapidly, and he heard his throat-mouth say, "Thank you for the gift, Istu. Your mother would be proud of you, believing in these things and becoming these things I told you about. Believing is becoming. And I believe you will do the world some good. Do whatever is truly right. We both love you, very much. Your mother is telling me to say this, but take care of yourself, and remember that believing in something isn't toxic and doesn't make you ignorant. If anything, it makes you the happiest fool alive, and some days, people want to be a fool. And that's okay. Fools are happy. And they can be wise too."

The shadows were silenced, as they ran to the broken moon. It had made them bleed, and had turned them into a rusty-red, just like the crowbar after it connected with his uncle's brain.

He felt the sky was soon erupting into dawn, even though there wasn't a sun anymore. The sky had smelled like lilacs and fetus juices. It was the dawn of a new day, and he knew he was very close to dying.