Where the hell am I?
This isn’t my bed.
This isn’t even my room.
I’m lying on a marble slab, naked as regret.
Sealed under a glass dome,
like I’m a toy some asshole collector didn’t want dust on.
White coats hover at the edges.
Machines hiss and beep.
Wires crawl out of my arms and legs,
like even my veins wanted to leave me.
Hospital?
Maybe.
No.
The ceiling.
Painted by lunatics.
Angels with steel wings.
Aliens with glowing eyes and laser whips.
Spaceships slicing clouds open like skin.
Like God commissioned a mural from Michelangelo
after he’d discovered comic books and cocaine.
This isn’t a dream.
I don’t think I’m dead.
There… beyond the glass,
a sea of bowed heads.
Hundreds. Thousands.
Every lip moving in unison,
a low, awful hum you only hear
when people talk about you the second you leave the room.
This isn’t a hospital.
This is a cathedral.
I sit up.
The machines shriek like they’ve just seen the bill.
White coats scatter…
one bolts through the back door,
the rest panic like fire alarms arguing with each other.
The congregation notices.
The wave rolls toward me.
Wet. Animal. Hysterical.
Half-grief, half-orgasm,
all nightmare.
God, I really need to quit drinking.
The back door slams open.
A figure enters.
Silence drops like a guillotine.
White coats part like the Red Sea.
The crowd freezes in reverence so sharp
the air itself feels like a cut.
And there he is:
A warrior priest.
Robes, bandana, armor, prayer beads.
Like a Renaissance fair sponsored by the sci-fi channel.
A costume designed by a committee
that hated each other
and hated subtlety even more.
He sees me and gasps.
Then drops to his knees.
Weeping. Not the delicate kind.
But the ugly kind.
Like a dam cracking.
The congregation follows.
One by one, bodies thudding to the ground.
Knees bent. Heads down.
Arms stretched out like they’re begging gravity for mercy.
And me?
I’m sitting here trying not to piss myself.
The man rises.
Walks to me, trembling.
Kisses my hand.
“It’s really you,” he whispers.
I look at my arms.
Spotted. Greyed. Wrinkled.
Skin thinned to paper.
What the hell happened?
How long have I been asleep?
He turns to the crowd.
Stretches his arms wide like a crucifix.
Bellows:
“Long live Kingcain!”
The congregation detonates.
Cheering. Dancing.
Music from nowhere.
Bodies spinning like someone spiked the holy water.
And me,
my mouth fills with the taste of spoiled meat.
My ears ring.
The world shrinks to a pinpoint.
Because I know that line.
“Long live Kingcain!”
I wrote it.
—
Kingcain.
My Frankenstein, built out of pulp and self-pity.
God, I hate that character.
A space messiah with action-figure morals.
Fighting space dictators and robot ninjas.
Preaching junk about soulwaves and godcodes.
All testosterone dressed as spirituality.
“Long live Kingcain!” was the catchphrase.
A stupid line I tossed into one of his stupid adventures.
The one where he crash-landed on a planet
run by fascist warrior nuns.
Yes. Seriously.
Fascist warrior nuns.
And yes, people read this crap.
The worst part? They liked it.
Maybe Barnum was right.
“There’s a sucker born every minute.”
And I was the asshole who fed them hundreds of these stories.
But this wasn’t the life I wanted.
I once dreamed of something real.
A novel that bled.
Poems that mattered.
Words that stayed behind
long after the last page.
Then she told me she couldn’t love me
and moved on without even asking how I was.
And I realized none of it mattered.
I was worthless. Unlovable. Unwanted.
So I built a character who was everything I wasn’t.
That was how Kingcain was born.
Not as art. Not as hope.
But as punishment.
Every story became self-loathing.
Self-harm with punctuation.
Because I hated myself
for believing I meant something.
It started as a way to cope.
Therapy with bad science fiction.
But over time, it calcified into routine.
Next thing I know,
I’m three hundred stories in,
a thousand bottles deep,
and fifteen years gone.
Now I don’t even think anymore.
I wake up, crank out another Kingcain story,
like Christmas dinner in a can,
send it to my publisher,
and drink myself to sleep.
Then rinse and repeat.
My flat is surrounded by towers of Kingcain.
Manuscripts. Drafts.
Editor notes. Artwork.
Spilling off my shelves like shame I couldn’t contain.
Some legacy.
A drunk with a talent for shlock.
A craftsman of garbage.
The Mozart of mediocrity.
If I die tomorrow, there will be no applause.
No last words.
Just a corpse bent over the keyboard,
reeking of whiskey,
pining for a love who never cared,
face-down in literary excrement.
What an idiot.
Oh well.
There’s a sucker born every minute.
—
He leads me toward the back room.
Armed guards trail behind like I’m sacred cargo.
The celebration rages on behind me.
Euphoria and hysteria climbing over each other,
each trying to drown the other out.
I can feel them thumping in my skull.
The priest leans in, smiling.
“Let them have this. They deserve this.
They waited fifty years for your return.
We all did.”
The words hit me like a sledgehammer.
Fifty years.
My lungs collapse.
The room tilts sideways.
The floor breathes.
For a second I wonder if I’m having a stroke
or if this is just what time tastes like
when it rots in your breath.
Fifty years.
Oh my god.
Now half a century is gone,
and I don’t remember blinking.
Everyone I knew… gone.
My publisher.
The whiskey clerk.
Her.
Oh God.
Her.
For years after she left,
I kept telling myself maybe.
Maybe I’d call.
Maybe I’d write.
Maybe tomorrow.
I wanted to tell her I’d give everything up for her.
Give us a chance.
Give me a chance.
But I knew it was stupid.
She had already moved on.
Probably found someone.
Built a life.
Forgot I ever existed.
Here’s the thing about hope:
it’s just a bad tooth you refuse to pull.
Hurts when you bite,
but you keep it anyway.
Now even that’s gone.
Time yanked it for me.
I never got to know if she would say yes.
But then again,
why would she?
—
The backroom door opens.
I stop.
It’s my apartment.
Only that it isn’t.
It’s too clean. Too precise.
My desk, my lamp, my bed… everything exactly where I left it,
but polished, enlarged, curated.
The bookshelf is lined with Kingcain drafts in neat rows.
No empty whiskey bottles. No take-out cartons.
The air smells of lemon polish and incense.
This isn’t my apartment.
It’s a showroom.
A shrine.
A taxidermy version of my life
with all the guts scooped out,
the stink removed,
posed to look holy.
The priest trembles with joy.
“It’s all true,” he says. “Every word you wrote.”
And then he’s off.
Zombies. Alien invasions. Fascist dictators.
Mind-control surveillance rays.
He rattles off a list like he’s opening sealed envelopes.
But he doesn’t sound crazy.
Not exactly.
He sounds like a man who’s spent decades
with a corkboard and red string,
peeling back my garbage until it looked like scripture.
“Your stories weren’t stories,” he says.
“They were codes. Metaphors. Symbols.
We spent years deciphering them.
You spoke in parables so the blind would not see.
But we saw.”
I have no idea what he’s going on about.
He talks fast, like he’s been rehearsing in the mirror for decades.
A flood of words spills over me.
Most of it drips away.
I only catch fragments:
“The trance of the world.”
“Political theatre.”
“Religious puppeteers.”
Good God, I need to quit drinking.
His lips kept moving.
But I’m not listening.
I’m thinking about her.
Did she ever think of me,
all those years I was in a coma?
Did she ever come looking?
Of course not.
Why would she?
I’m an idiot for even hoping.
There’s a sucker born every minute.
In the flurry of his monologue,
one word cuts through the static.
“Resurrection…”
Then another.
“Our messiah.”
My hair stands on end.
There must be a mistake.
No… this can’t be happening.
His face beams.
“In chapter 298, you said you would return.
And here you are.
Fifty years, to the dot.”
Oh no.
I know this story.
“Your soul reborn to lead the Great Cleansing…
through the Soulwave…
our true God…”
Please don’t say it.
Please, let me be wrong.
Please.
“Lord Kingcain.”
—
All I hear is ringing in my ears.
The world drifts away, distant and blurred.
Everything moves like it’s under water.
I feel nothing. Just numb.
He keeps talking,
reciting the last fifty years like a book report.
Calm as a man balancing a checkbook.
Hundreds of thousands joined.
The poor, the rich, the powerful, the forgotten.
Everyone else called us a cult at first.
Crazy. Radical. Gullible.
But over time, people saw the truth.
“They eventually realised…
that their religions were nothing more
than mass insanity with better PR.”
He smiles, sly,
“But like you wrote…
there’s a sucker born every minute.”
Oh goddammit.
I glance around at this sterilised replica of my life.
The stupid manuscripts. The scrubbed desk.
The hollow furniture of a man who never lived.
I don’t exist anymore.
I’m an outline where something used to be.
The world kept Kingcain instead.
The paper messiah.
The punishment I invented for myself.
He keeps talking.
Nuclear missiles, he says.
Built in my name.
For the Great Cleansing.
One for every country that defied us.
My heart caves in.
My hands shake.
Blood drains from my head.
I don’t know how to process it.
This is the ending in Kingcain 305.
The last story I wrote.
I reach for her name in my head and come up empty.
She was the only reason I didn’t ruin myself early.
Even faint, the hope of her kept me going.
Now even her ghost won’t answer.
All that’s left is a mask strapped to warheads.
He looks at me, eyes shining.
“Now we await your final commandment, my Lord.”
The room is silent.
Guards leaning in.
Everyone waiting.
For me to damn the world with my own breath.
I sit.
Hollow.
Useless.
Already dead.
“Kid,” I say finally.
“Before we go any further… get me a whiskey.
Make it a strong one.”
Featured image adapted from a photo by Trophim Laptev.
See more on Unsplash: @laptevtro.
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