About: A man on a walk who discovers there's a secret between grains of sand.
Excerpts: "A singular path may lead to no particular place, or—on a day like today—it may lead me to an older woman petting a cat opposite a garbage can filled with sand."
"The horrors of the ocean were always something I’d considered interesting, but until this moment in my life I had never thought them important. Secrets are usually intangible things, and if they were to be tangible I’d always pictured them as something vast, like a horizon or the distance a pen could travel on the ground before it ran out of ink—never, not once, had I pictured it as something that could fit between two grains of sand."
About: A man in a supermarket explodes after seeing a woman in a soup isle.
Excerpts: "The bones of Oliver Mann wanted desperately to flee. They’d never known a body without a soul, nor had they been the harbinger of such primal thought before. So, they remained stationary. The muscles of Oliver Mann were agents of the heart, a tortured being that longed to dance with the specimen mere feet away. The heart lurched, following suit of the soul, and the muscles of the hands, back, legs, chest, face, and all the other disgusting nooks and crannies followed. Oliver Mann was tearing himself in two... It would not be false to say he suffered more in this moment than any man of his stature had in recent human history."
READ "Oliver Mann: Feeling Like a Woman":
The following account has been compiled over three months and 22 days regarding an incident at local Indiana Grocery store, Dolly’s Produce. The subject in question—Oliver Mann (24)—appeared to spontaneously combustin the soup aisle after parking his cart next to one Cindy Egan (26). Although no scientific explanation has been provided for the incident, a comprehensive account compiled from several eyewitnesses, security footage, and close family members of the victims are as follows:
Oliver Mann was gripped by a great force, an electrifying pulse of lust quivering beneath his skin. His flesh screamed, begging to be released. His blood ran much too hot but cooled around his mind, leaving him sharp, alert, and focused.
His thoughts prattled in every direction, assigning the woman every sense of sensual sensibility he could—hypnotized by pomegranate seeds, coffee, pollen, wet ink, dried tears, cracked eggs, soft prayers. He grasped at her straws. Each of his senses was completely overtaken, so much so he began confusing her smell for her hips, the color of her eyes with her voice—she was something much grander than he had ever seen.
Her short stature and perfectly groomed hair stood ablaze against the drab surroundings. She was a goddess. Her clothing draped with otherworldly elegance, disguised her details and secrets. He longed to rip them off. It was intoxicating. Every piece of her seemed to be built just for him. He could practically feel himself inside her, clawing at her skin, swallowing her freckles.
As Oliver Mann’s eyes traced up the woman, his soul wormed its way through his body, greeting his various faculties as it did so. It transformed the stomach into an atrium of canaries. Assaulting the heart, the soul swirled through each atrium, crashing into the arteries, foaming at the oxygen—it was voracious. His lungs expanded to twice their size, pressing hard against his faltering ribs, clawing for the air outside the skin. The complete titillation of his muscular system let the soul press on, penetrating the esophagus. Oliver Mann’s chest was pressurized by feeling, his diaphragm squashed beneath sensation. He could not swallow the soul now bubbling over, burning him from the inside out. Scorching heat twisted itself from the back of his mouth to the roots of his stomach, causing him to seize violently from within. Every synopsis was erect.
He screamed but the vocal cords had become charred, ashy strings. At this precise moment, his soul expelled itself from the body, tired of its constraints and pains. It flew from Oliver Mann and landed on the floor, flopping about until it coated the linoleum in its acidic makeup. Stained from his own soul, Oliver Mann took a step forward towards the creature that had caused him this pain. With shattered ribs, misshapen lungs, a blackened throat, and frozen mind, he willed himself to move. His body was in no such state.
The bones of Oliver Mann wanted desperately to flee. They’d never known a body without a soul, nor had they been the harbinger of such primal thought before. So, they remained stationary.
The muscles of Oliver Mann were agents of the heart, a tortured being that longed to dance with the specimen mere feet away. The heart lurched, following suit of the soul, and the muscles of the hands, back, legs, chest, face, and all the other disgusting nooks and crannies followed.
Oliver Mann was tearing himself in two.
His bones fled south as his flesh pushed north. They began to separate, as if oil and water. The pain was like nothing any human has ever experienced. It would not be false to say he suffered more in this moment than any man of his stature had in recent human history. Organs pushed through bone matter, shredding themselves for an unwinnable cause. Blood leaked out of every orifice blending with his soul on the ground, pops and fizzes punctuated his silent screams of torture. Why was she doing this to him? every piece of him wailed.
His tissue, free of structure, fell to the floor in wet masses of scrap. The arms of a man who once played baseball were now the skins of a rabbit. The back of a man bad at poker was discarded, ribboned in shreds atop his head. A head, paired with loose eyes and ears, now completely lacking its form. You could not tell if he had been handsome or ugly. You could not tell if he’d ever possessed a face. Every part of him was grotesque, in a mound, as if a human form had been regurgitated. He was blistered, bloody, bile filled.
His bones fell with nothing to keep them together—the final clatters of a man’s being. Oliver Mann accepted his fate, dying both unloved and profoundly loving. He had destroyed himself for a woman, every part of his form, his death, and his life was dedicated to her. He had nothing to show for his affections but a decimated, already decaying body—now moved to the side of the curb by a bag boy.
His mind was the last thing to go. It was eaten by a wild dog 37 minutes after his death. According to the dog, it generally lacked substance.
About: Growing up in deserts and moving to the snow.
Excerpts: "I am not sure what pieces of me remain on the boiling asphalt in front of my home; that day I ruined a pair of shoes."
"And I am hidden from my sun in down coats and fleece scarves and knit hats all because it is not stronger than the clouds that obscure it.
Paper covers rock."