Explicit

I hate sleeplessness. I would know since I haven’t been able to sleep more than three hours a night for the last few weeks. Sure, it was enough for me to function fine in the mornings, but once it got to be the late afternoon, I could barely keep my eyes open. The stress of my everyday life is what’s causing it, and the shitty thing is the lack of good sleep just piles on more stress!

The instant Liliace awoke, she perceived the condition of the soil from the shady darkness inside her flower. Her roots knurled in the earth like toes wriggling through sand.

The nutrient balance was different. Slightly more traces of stone. Neighbors. Dozens of them.

She uncurled the large orange petals surrounding her while straightening her back and emerged into the slightly cool morning air and the warmth of the brilliant summer sunlight on her fern-green skin.

With a grunt Alex raised the shutter door, the pale blue of the outside lamps filtering into the storage unit.  It was spacious and kept fastidiously clean, with a cot, mini-fridge, and portable electric stove suggesting that he had spent more than a few nights in here.  As Alex and Reverie stepped inside he let the door close behind them, plunging them into darkness until he turned on the flood lamps, bathing the room and its contents in light.  By the far wall were two metal boxes a bit larger than chemical toilets, with tight bundles of cables at their bases leading to a t

You had no idea how long you’d been skulking around this place for. It could have been a few days just as easily as it could have been a few hours. Your brain’s capacity to process the passage of time had fallen by the wayside amid the constant switching from tense, methodical planning of every single step you were to make to instinctual dashes for survival in a desperate effort to get away from those, those things.