The rats never slept when the end of the world was beginning to rise. The rats never ate anything worth savoring, all except for chocolate and grape juice. Drunk, their tails gathered together, shit-filled, their teeth like ivory keys, their pink-fleshed hands dashed throughout the city, and people have fallen onto the cement, their eyes rolled in the back of their skulls, their fingernails full of excrement and the blood of rats, their flesh bit and chewed through.

The night had been painted, the stars obscured by my father's black paint.

Without the mother moon coming to comfort them through their time of misery, the rats had cried through the dark, and they wrenched their hands free of the bladed stars (the same ones I want to cut myself up on), and their eyes glinted through the paint, the shiny red lights like little searing flames. They had praised the moon to be their god before, but had soon grown disappointed when it flashed out of the waxy sky. The candle's flame was no longer there. The rats have eaten upon the flesh of the dead humans, Tumbletim telling them the end was nigh, and that the writer of the raven story was a misguided soul, a misguided god that was telling the world of his sickness, his malady of brilliance.

Benjamin scuttled in the street, seeing the orbs of light becoming darker, no longer a sheen of crystal in the light that was visible, but a dismal allegory to how bright Seattle had used to be, the emerald city that had bled through his fingers, the goldenrods no longer as glazed and as piercing as they were. They now looked like pyrite, the gems no longer shining, but were now forever false gold teeth of Seattle. The teeth begun to be shattered, rats forming from its mouth. Foaming. Full of rabies. It was ready to be slashed through with a bullet.

The rats swam through the city, picking up any dead human, the Emerald City (maggot city, do you agree with me here?) rife with disease. Benjamin wondered to find his owner, the owner with the metallic teeth, the glasses that always shined in the blue shattered light, but he had worries that she moved away as the sea dragons were swimming away from the black dismal sea, and Benjamin glanced at his wrists, so sparse with cuts were they, their small open holes so prominent in the black chasm of the city, and the rat sighed, as he put the injuries of the past away, waiting for the girl to pass in his vision.

She would soon come in, with her white floral dress, her braces shining in this deep dark stinking pit, the hands so clean and perfect, unlike his. The rat tried to sniff for her scent, the smell of rat food so clear, the ingredients she used of egg whites and real meat, he couldn't find it, and she was only a distant remnant of his memories. The little girl was the only one who had cared for him in the past, and her pity at him being mistreated by the other rats, the man who abused him and forced him to commit sacrilege and cannibalism, he watched as the cars grown fewer in the streets, as more men and women were dying, the children were left alone to their meaningless games of hop scotch and jump rope, until they disappeared, sick with the illness the rats handed to them, dying in their snow-white bed like they themselves were Snow White, with their lips so pale, their skin like fragile dusted glass.

The parents of Miles, the Queen and the Slave, and the Child Himself, so hung close together with their dead bodies, ripe, rank, and ready to be cut open by the butcher, hanging like dead cows ready to be made into a fine steak. For the rich, for the rich! A ribeye steak for the hungry fools. Let them eat and let them have their bellies full of creatures that once were noble in their lives, until they had sniffed the Oxy's, until the young one had eaten cyanide and the snake had coiled around his neck.

Sonic had picked the child's blue, cold, suffocated body in his arms, his face looking so glazed as all the air had escaped from him, the martyr who had received his wish, the shooting star so ignited in the air, ready to give the world a last chance before the world had been torn asunder by my bladed fingertips, like the sun I was, the sun that I made disintegrate in my fingertips! I could never make the world shine brightly again, it would all be dark, all be full of death, as the depression sidled away in my brain, as the coldness in my heartbeat began to freeze my arteries, inside I was a sick, very sick boy, with the cystic fibrosis hurting my brother, my lovely brother! Wellaway! He coughed and hacked as cut the rattlesnake's body, and he felt the child's coldness as all the warmth had left his body, the child as dead as Sonic knew he would be soon, soon to be dubbed The New Christ, the New World Birther. Soon he would wear white robes and wear a beard. Soon he would become a carpenter. Soon he would be kissed by Judas! The kiss of death! The kiss of betrayal! How hot it burned his flesh, like a brander.

The needle beat inside his cheek, like a heart, a newborn fetus ready to come out and be full of placenta. It kicked, it screamed inside, and he had carried the child's frozen body outside in the streets, hearing God talk to him that his life would soon be ending.

God is our savior, God is our witness, God will pull you through…I swear by it…

He had begun to detest his lovely brother, even though his skin had begun to crack like an egg, the rotten flesh steaming through his soul (frying him, watching him burn in my pan, waking up all the children I had worship me, making them eat upon my brother's flesh)…

Come all ye faithful, watch him die, watch my lovely brother die. He hates me now, and I expect it. Watch as the mercury inside my head continue to seep through, oh lovely blood, oh such lovely blood that is coming out of my crown of brier thorns…

Sonic died once, and he knew he would die again, and again…

He died when his brother died.

He died when he attempted suicide.

He died when Quetzalcoatl had tried to eat him.

He died when he saw Shadow.

He died when Shadow tried to kill him.

He died, over and over, and he always been resurrected by faith. Faith, and faith alone.

Three hearts were swallowed in his gut, the one in his cheek, the one inside God, and the one inside himself, the New Christ.

My brother would soon die, my friends.

I watched him as he told me stories in my crib, rocking me to sleep, on that cold, moonless, February night, when our mother was too busy nursing a bottle of red wine instead of me, my father nursing his crazy little head to go to sleep. I watched him when we told our very first short story, as we tip-tapped the typewriter, typing out things that didn't make sense except to our little hearts, our secrets that our parents couldn't understand. He told me he could publish the very first short story we did, and he gave me high hopes that my tales I spun from my crystallized web were worth much more than dead insects and butterflies I had caught inside that ashy gray tree in our yard. I watched him when he protected me from all these bullies, when I only wanted to read Wuthering Heights and Walden and War and Peace in fourth grade. I knew of what these people were against. I knew of what these authors have witnessed, their heads so storming with the mighty seas inside, the sea as mighty as Seattle's, and I had kissed their shoes and have found out why they were so sick. Always it was something. Alcoholism. Bipolar disease. Death of someone they loved dearly. I wanted to be like that. A damaged artist. An artist whose wounds were like broken glass, so visible, so tangible to everyone else. I knew I was dying slowly as the pill began to overtake me. And this story, it's overtaking me too. All of this is true, my friends. I really was such a sick spider, a sick black widow that wanted to poison my brother, make him into a god as mighty as me. I gave the tiger my small spider balls and I had given my brother my big tiger balls. He was supposed to be brassy, strong, ready to tear the world with his mighty thunderous hands, but my brother is sick too. He is sick with his own illness. He had caught the shitstick from my father. He is becoming depressed, manic, schizophrenic, dead. He believed in many delusions in this story. And gods, all kinds of gods, have become the delusions themselves, and were believed in by the people. Their faith was nothing more but a delusion in itself. And the world had always run on delusions. Money and delusions.

Going on my tangent about these authors, oh mighty they must have been back in the day, with their mighty pens and swords, their mighty minds so graceful to pluck these words and lay them out like succulent grapes! I have knowledge of all these authors. I knew what their life was like. I knew what it felt to write those stories. I knew how the process went. And I became a writer, because writers are the closest thing to being a god as you can be, with my body so full of mucous, my frail glass ribs ready to break under my brother's hands as he had tightened his chest, further and further he wanted to reach into his heart, eat everything I had collected during my all-knowledgeable years of being a god…He wanted to crush me under his weight, and I said sorry to him, and he refused to hear me, as I remember of the plate that had crashed underneath his hands, as he forced me to eat the shards, the porcelain blue glass that would cut my tender gums and he had said, "Eat it. Eat it you filthy bastard."

The china blue plate. I remember it so. It had spilled with the shit my mother made when she nursed that bottle of zinfandel, and I had watched him pick it up…

My short stories weren't great, or good, but I tried to show my words to the world. My words that the end of the world was coming, and I have the veined electric that sparked of white and blue hands to prove it, because I am becoming sick, my friends. Sick with the Trileptal, sick with the bipolar that had sickened me upon birth, like my cystic fibrosis. My bipolar was the real cause as to why I was ailed. Not the cystic's. Not that. It was just our shitty genes in our family, the shitty diseases of the mind. My father being schizophrenic, me being bipolar, Sonic being just like that fucking bastard, as he watched his CNN and wrote theories that the Arabians were coming to take over our country, that the sky was water and the ground was lava and the people were all mechanizations underneath their rubber skin. Sick. Fucking sick. Sick, sick, sick.

Staying up for days, weeks, writing. Writing so vividly, people can imagine themselves in that world, that world I felt so proud of. Feeling happy about everything, feeling that ricketing euphoria as you made these bold decisions, as you suddenly made your story not make so much sense as it used to what seemed to be eons again, as you sleep for days and sleep even the mornings like nights, as you sleep the afternoons like they're dull abscesses in the sun as it shined on your fucking skin and made you want to puke. As you listened to a person's voice and suddenly remembered why you hated them in the first place. Why you instantly felt cerulean blue upon the sound of them scolding you or criticizing you and calling you a piece of shit Mania is intoxicating, as intoxicating as the finest wines my mother drank, it makes you feel like you can do anything, and that your future is bright, and the light will always shine in your direction, and the sun will always be in the sky with bloody knifed fingers. Stabbing me with its rays. I had watched the sun go down and then I had descended into darkness, as the moon showed its glacial face and I became a personification, as I became a tree knifed by the moon, becoming a screaming banshee as I continued to sway my arms, dancing with the moon, dancing with this madness inside my skull, seeing all the black overflow my eyes. The moon was my symbol for my depression. It had shined so brightly whenever I had slept for three weeks, it shined when I thought of crying and cutting upon my lovely skin that the moon effaced, I wished to jump off the bridge near our home and drown in the sea, but too many people had watched me, too many people wanted to keep me safe. For my stories. For my intelligence. But I could tell my mother and father no longer cared. Just my brother. As I gazed at the moon, watched it ascend in the sky, and soon, my blood had turned cold, my hands went limp, and my eyes had turned down, and I was ready to sleep for I only knew how long. Three weeks. Three months. Three hundred days. It was always three. Three was my unlucky number.

The mercury had become black. And I had spent weeks in bed, sleeping. I slept for that three days straight that one lone day that my family had never bothered to check up on me. I never came out of my room. It was as dark as the window, with the stars never searing through it, like a hot poker through the black leather of the night. It was as dark as I felt. My heart continued beating, but the blood didn't flow. It had coagulated inside me.

Sonic would often bring my dinner to me in a tray, telling me I had to get up. But I said no. I wanted to die.

I wanted to take the knife that was inside Sonic's bag, and rip myself up like a cold slice of turkey meat…Make myself a nice lunch that everyone could enjoy. And then tear my heart out and let him eat it. I knew that the Aztecs had always sacrificed hearts to keep their lives healthy, their folklores withstanding. I am not an Aztec god, but would it be nice to have that fit of barbarism, that blood flowing inside your mouth, that heart still beating for half a second before you tore into it…I was a god, and people worshiped me, and now I would let people worship themselves as they ate me. Worship my brother, as he ate my flesh and my blood, and has been christened The New Christ. I am The Old Christ. There were multiple Christs through this world, did you know that? They lived in different generations, different eras of time, and now, it was time for the new gods to come in, and take over everything. I couldn't live like this anymore no more no more I am heart stricken with thunder and envy I no longer need to be alive I no longer need to be so outspoken my stories are all garbage I never should've write them now I'm going to be remembered as the shittiest writer of all time and everyone is going to eat upon my shit words and say how disgusting it was, even though that shit was made with wine and bread…

Make the blood fall to the floor. Like they say in Clockwork Orange, kroovy blood? So red, so full of life. Only bleeding would make me alive. Only dying would make me alive.

Make myself so bloody, make myself see only blackness and the bruises that were growing on my wrists like ugly plums, ugly violets, and Sonic had forced me to eat, because I refused, my gaunt body ready to fall apart like sand and sawdust. My mouth was wire-trapped shut. I didn't want to eat my mother's disgusting shit-brown stew. I wasn't even sure if she made it with her own hands. She could've used her ass for it.

"Open up," he said.

I clamped my mouth shut, like I was stitched (black stitches that Sonic once had on his mouth, right readers?). He held the spoon away from my face, of the slop my mother made with her own shitty iodine hands (or ass, when drinking so much liquor her head was swimming with how much she hated us). I was like a fucking child, a fucking infant, when he tried to put the disgusting shit in my mouth, to force me to chew, to force me to suck and to be nourished by food, this foreign thing I didn't need. I would've died of starvation. And that was what I wanted, even with my cystic body ready to die a year later.

"We're going to get a goddamn feeding tube to feed you, Wind. And shove those fucking tubes through your nose. Doesn't that sound like fun? Do you want to be treated like a fucking anorexic?"

It was one of the first fights my brother and I had. He had slammed the plate of food onto the floor, shattering it like stars in the sky, and I remembered that was how I had made the universe, too long ago.

I had shattered one moon in the sky (we used to have two) and I made the stars. Just like that plate. I was thinking of shattering the other moon too. It had reeked of my decay.

The slop remained, and he had told me to eat it off the floor if I truly wanted to know how disgusting the food could be.

With the shards of glass intact, he told me to eat it.

"I thought you loved your brother," I said. "I'm not going to eat shit that can destroy my body and cut my tongue up."

He had placed his fingertips in the food, swiping the slop, the blood from his finger and the glass shards inside, and he had placed it inside my nose, and told me to snort it all. Like a cocaine addict. Like someone addicted to Roxy's.

"I'll call the fucking police! You can't be doing that to me! I'm going to call the police and you'll be in jail for domestic abuse! Do you want that, brother? You've already been in a mental institution for running away for a week cause the police thought you were suicidal! You were ready to jump off a bridge! What the hell is wrong with you?"

The blood dripped from his finger, the slop turning red.

My brother wanted to kill himself a year ago. He couldn't deal with my death, me slowly dying as the moon rose higher in the sky. He couldn't stand to see me going back into the hospital the next day. He avoided me as my mother and father had doted over me and had told me they'll see me in a few hours and to be sure to eat all the good food the hospital had (charming laugh). But Sonic was never there. He thought of killing himself again, which is why he trapped himself in his room, watching the sky fall and bleed and die. He could see the sun die, so many times.

He paused, thinking about the mental institution again. He was supposed to be institutionalized for many years, but he had convinced the doctors he was not suicidal anymore. He had convinced the world that he was no longer sick. He had believed his soul and body were dead for years, as dead as my body was going to be a year later.

"I thought I told you we weren't going to talk about that, Wind."

Silence erupted from the halls, in my room. The blood continued to emanate from the finger, his scar looking purple, possibly becoming infected. But I knew my brother didn't care. He probably welcomed it.

"Mental illness spreads in the family," I said, nonchalant.

He gazed at the ground, seeing the slop lapped up by insects. He had wanted them to lap up his blood too, the blood that was riverring from my nose.

"Dad had been in that same mental institution for a year, you know that, right?"

"He was supposed to be there for the rest of his life," I added.

"His prognosis was poor. He's on the computer all the time, talking with this guy named NocturnusTheorist. Chatting with him. Talking about how the government is against them. Their conversations I can never make sense of. They speak in typed tongues."

"He doesn't take his medicine."

"He thinks machines are added in those pills."

"I wonder if this NocturnusTheorist guy is just as insane. He's probably in one of those fancy institutions where they actually let you on the computer. I'm sure he refuses his medication too."

"What did they diagnose you with, brother?"

The blood begun to reach my lips. I was becoming a clown, with my face so pale, the mouth so red, the eyes so sucked in. I was a harlequin ready to entertain children and make them shit their pants. Sonic had stood motionless, remembering the papers the doctors had handed to them, his mother crying a few small tears at the realization that the family was full of lunatics.

"Delusional disorder. Possible emerging schizophrenia. Maybe bipolar. They didn't know. They diagnosed you with bipolar type I, right? One where you're mostly manic?"

The window had been painted black by my father a long time ago. Our mother never bothered to fix it. I can only see the small blades of car lights passing by. She said she would have to get a new window, but other things had preoccupied her. Like merlot. Like the many other flavors of wine that danced throughout her tongue.

"Yes. But I like the mania. It makes the world all the more beautiful. And I often finish a lot of my short stories with it, the novel I am planning to write…"

He knew the mania was killing me. He couldn't watch me die slowly anymore. The blood continued to drip from my nose, and he wiped it away, but no more, as the blood continued to drop to the floor, and I didn't see my brother for the rest of the day.

Sonic had left the room and had cleaned up the mess as to not leave any evidence of what occurred. The bleeding soon stopped, and Sonic had cleared it of glass and had bandaged it. He did not clean the wound.

Like father, like son.

I had stood in the hallway around my empty sack of a body, watching as my brother had left the home again, riding his bike, to God knows where. My mother said nothing. She never said anything. Neither did Dad.

I continued to write this story. The raven story was already completed a long time ago, my friends. I have given them a rough draft of the first few chapters. That story wasn't my best, but this one, it had contained my struggles, the beating and bleeding of my useless heart, and as I watch Sonic bury the small child in the backyard, along with the Queen and the Slave, he had prayed to Me, and had told Me that he wished they would have a safe journey in heaven. But I told him there wasn't one. Only Hell.

And they all had entered inside its bloody, fiery mouth.

—

The rat had waited for the woman who loved him to come back, but she never came.

She was dead, he had said. She was dead. As dead as me.

He wondered what happened to Durden, to Holden, to Gatsby, to Beowulf. They had died along with her, their bodies rotting with hers in her grave. The other rats were a year older than him, he was sure they had died. Rats only lived for about two years before they had turned into machines.

He had seen Tumbletim and the others, swarming the city, diving into the humans' body and sucking out their fat and blood. He had witnessed the rats dying from their traps, the rats being stomped on as the humans had screamed and flailed, and the Black Death had sucked the life out of the Emerald City. The shops no longer had customers, the delicious food being licked to cleanliness by the rats. The parks were full of dead bodies. The roads no longer had cars. No one was driving anywhere. They were all too sick, the ridges of their eyes full of pustules.

He unhooked his fingers as he watched a black hedgehog walking down the street, his gun gripped so tightly in his hand. His wings had scraped the paint off the house his owner had lived in. With each step he took, his wings seemed to grow. Becoming as large as the entire city, his eyes becoming more brilliant with flames that danced inside his irises.

The gun rattled in his hand. His quills had looked shaggy, unkempt, and the cigarette stick had dangled from his mouth, ready to fall, unlit. Such a small stick, Benjamin had thought. He was out of cigarettes and smoking half ones from the parks.

He could've stole some from the store, but he could tell the hedgehog had thought it didn't matter. There were other things in his mind.

He carried a plastic bag in his other hand. He imagined it was food, some simple groceries, but as he looked closer, they were stakes.

The rat had looked up to him, and spoke, his eyes wavering. The sky was cracking up, little by little, as fists rained down on it.

"What are you planning to do with those stakes? Where the hell are you going when the world is ending? I can't find my owner, and I'm pretty damn sure she's dead. Dead as you're going to be soon."

He faced him, his eyes looking luminous even in the pitch of night.

"I got something important to do. It's none of your business. Leave me the hell alone."

Benjamin's eyes couldn't stop glaring into his. Their eyes were both that cherried red, bloody and looking as if they haven't slept in so long, the hedgehog continued walking, walking over the bodies of many men and women and children. Blind, deaf, and dumb, he thought. They never had seen this world beginning to die.

The rat had chittered and scattered along with him, his feet so small, so slow compared to how the hedgehog walked. His body had grown much more raven-like as the night had grown darker, his feathers beginning to slink through his skin, the muzzle hard, yellow, a long slender beak that carried apothecary flowers to burn, the skeletal wings becoming monstrous, wings that carried the same glass-like quality, the obsidian night looking so ornate, so shining, the same glass plate that had smashed against my floor, the same window that was painted a smeared black…

The white rat, the eyeballs so red and tired, had sought out his plastic bag, and he had ridden with him as his feet had stomped on the rolling sea of bodies, waiting for him to make the dead body count rise to one more.

He gazed at the cemetery, and he felt the cemetery gaze back at him.

The cat with black eyes had welcomed him, as she carried the white lotus flower around her hands, igniting the darkness into light. He could feel it beat. A heart was inside it, of a long dead god.

The gun around his hand had been gripped tighter, tighter, that his hands were red and sore.

Benjamin watched the raven crow out its song, as a shooting star had crashed into the obelisk sky of the night, and had watched it shattered, with the blood of God streaming through it.