The eunuch named K. and his-her mustache.

I know how the smart mind fears stoppage.

Against the clear and blue Bangalorean sky, the buildings stand still, the chafed facades of concrete meaningless against the still yet depthless waters in the empyrean receptacle. Flakes of clouds seem imminent in the western distance, and their approach is slow, graceful, and all such and other things lost from the weakened mind. The eternal struggle diminishes its distinctive flavor and grinds it constantly along the edges; it lies now like a chamfered ingot of iron that pushes itself, sans any intelligence whatsoever, a metallic zombie, pushes itself toward construction and contribution.

Then again, there are no footholds in the clear and blue Bangalorean sky. It slips over the mountains in the East and slips into the sea in the East like a satin bedspread unfurled across the lands within the horizons and let to lie there like a vast stretch of discarded canvas. I digress: it is not my place to comment on the performative genders of dreams. Do you see the struts, K.?

The struts. The struts are essential because they hold up the whole structure, and the struts are essential because they give you some meaning to work with. When the structure's up, you can lean on it. Lean? Why is there any leaning? Let the structure stand, I say, and let it grow toward the heavens. That's the point of this task, to let them grow and flaw so that I may know wherewith to grant on my remedies, my solutions, and know that I'm on my way to manhood. To know that I've long since crossed puberty, and that a mustache is imminent, and that the man will flower and give birth to another young man, and young men will abound for the joy of the creator! Who?

The creator! The dreams of our nights when the canvas' weave breaks at odd places and starlight shines through like the very, very distance edge of a cosmic scissor. A trimmer! A trimmer? You've lost it. You've lost me. You call yourself an agent, you narcissist, you! You're a pimp! A pleasure-monger, and if I let you, you will make a product out of my dreams, a package of intellectual gibberish. You will call it a construction! But it is a construction!

Oh, no, no, no, no, it is not a construction. It was constructed but it is not yet in possession of a completion, and in lacking that completion, it lacks everything it possesses, you abacinated man! Move that place from in front of your eyes and throw it away into the skies, and let it quench, that malleated veil. Oh, it's electric, but it blinds with its metallic will, its metallic will. The mustache will never come not as a matter of destiny, no, it will reject invitations and it will reject prospects because mustaches have no dreams, and it will choose to languish as a eunuch in that womb whence I came, and it languishes in the comfort of my joy and my pleasures that I left behind. Oh, the cavernous orphanage! Not the orphanage! Why the orphanage at all?!

I will become a man, I swear to you, I will become a man and I will do it by climbing up onto the terrace of that building, the one with the chafed facade of pink paint and very old concrete, and from there, I will traverse the skies. I know how the smart mind fears stoppage, and hidden twelve feet under that moment of stoppage is my manhood, the pause-and-think, the pitch-and-toss-and-never-worry-about-my-loss endeavour that we all know stands in my way, S.

We all do, don't we?! Assumptions! Pshaw! And from there- Pshaw!- from THERE!, from beneath that vast pit that opens only into the skies, I will not lean but climb all the stairs it proffers for my climbing. There, on top of the world, I will become a man. A child will be born and he will descend from the heavens. Do not kill him.

Listen to me, O Cosmic Builder, O! That was fantastic but you must know that I will leave now, your much-impressed creator, and I will leave now to create this Universe in your image, in your contorted image. Be warned, father, you who cower in the darkness and run unclothed under the white sun, listen! You must lean upon your construction and push against it with all your masculine strength for if you keep building and building, you will be a mason, a constructor, and never an artist, never a performer except for the pleasing of your own self, and there, look therein!

Look to find that you don't want to be a man, and if you never will break and only birth all the while, you will never be a man. A eunuch, a half-man, but never the full one. The mustache, then? Precisely.

Fin de siècle

The sky was on fire. In the west, a violent orange glow blossomed out from a point that seemed just beyond the horizon. Black clouds were climbing out, erupting into petals of grey that gently floated to the zenith before disappearing into insignificant wisps of rain.

A giant fetus was descending down from the sky. From beneath the bridge of steel, I could see only its body; its head and legs were out of sight behind the buildings to my left and my right. The hue of its skin was a golden yellow, but it was an unpleasant sight, the skin of its form draped with dripping eidolons and an unspeakable horror exploded to life behind my eyes.

Men ran screaming in all directions. Some of the women fainted; they were forgotten, left behind by a madness ripe with sourceless fear, a disbelief that stretched their consciences toward puerile humor, to laughter. A rejection of this real and unborn child into a pus-filled boil, and a "pop!" later, it would be gone with it, too. And they would all be left standing, laughing, and then they would pick up their wives and go home to television sets.

The children themselves stood and gazed, but it was a silent and voiceless agony that rooted them to their spots, the picture of the prophet reflected brightly in the tears in their eyes, a form moving slowly but steadily to meet them. It was an encounter and they were meeting their creator.

I shuddered to think what might happen if the child landed. There was no way to know, of course: never before had such a thing happened. There was also the chance that other such fetuses were descending from the empyrean around the world, over large cities, overs people, over running men and swooning women, over praying children, over me.

I ran. I didn't run away from the monster but I ran to get under it. In a moment of brilliance, I positioned myself right under the approaching form and waited with a knife held up towards it. I waited. It seemed to come closer and closer. After an hour, I was sure it would fall upon the knife and bleed to death. But no, it covered the entire sky, blanketing all humanity beneath a shroud of half-alive and surely malformed skin, the stench of it disgusting, filling my nose with the pungent indulgence of sulfurous and sulfidic gases.

The world was dark. Humankind was tottering on the brink of extinction. I had given up all hope when the fetus awakened from its strange sleep. It woke up and began to cry, to bawl. It was the last mourning.