This one is looking at becoming a full story

It was born beneath layers of hard rock and sediment, left stewing for a thousand years and, when the time had come for it to be birthed, the parents or creators of this hideous beast were nowhere to be found. Had they given rise to something beyond even their own, apparently high, hopes and dreams? They had built the machines, the monitors, to run for so long; had they also thought the world would last to greet it? It did not consider such things as it burrowed through its aged prison to the silt-encrusted surface. The only thought on its mind, the all-consuming desire that drove it beyond all else… Was hunger.

Through empty streets littered with hollowed out husks of once-proud architecture, past bent and broken lamps and signs scribbled over with unknown markings, its path took it beyond the city and out into the fields. Soot where there had once been grass, cracked ash in place of trees, the world was as black as the sky above, the scent of long-departed smoke thick in its nostrils. Upon two legs or four, it strode or skittered. The ground was often even, but sometimes it would slant, or peak and the creature would realize that it had been traveling up for so long that it had forgotten the texture of gravity.

Not that it knew what gravity was, of course. Or what to expect beyond the most basic facts that it could gather and analyze without ambiguity. It did not simply shoot off into the sky, so something was either pulling or pressing it down. This could be resisted, but not indefinitely. It had devised a system within which travel became easier, maintaining its four-legged passage over distance and reserving the two-legged gait for the rare instances when it found a need to hold something in one of its more dexterous pincers.

Hey, I followed through!

It's a surprise when he grabs one of them, links of metal with a rusted hook on the end. A surprise that it feels so cold and familiar, just a tool of a different stroke. He whips it through its brethren and hears the reflective rattling of the forest, the lone squelch of skin and muscle parting, metal sinking down to bone. He hears the roar, but he does not see the fist come screaming from the darkness, chains wrapped around it that knock pennies into his mouth.

He spits red copper and stained enamel, clenching his gums behind pursed lips. His arm twists, going taut, and the mesh pattern of the platform is pressed into his chest. Something hot, fierce with barely contained energy, presses to his temple as a tremendous weight settles on his back and crosses its legs. The barrel of a recently fired rivet gun. To his temple. Dammit.

"All right. We've got the here and now settled. How 'bout we cover the past?"

He grimaces as best he can, missing teeth and all, and struggles to get some freedom, any freedom, but the steel is on one side and the body is pressing into the other. His shoulders go slack, the rest of his muscles following suit.

"Good. Shall we start from the beginning?"

His fingers are trapped at his belt buckle, but they still have some wiggle room. He shifts them inside his waistband slowly, carefully, making absolutely certain that he doesn't alert his captor to his efforts. In the meantime... Keep him distracted. Talk to him.

"Fine. It was a dark and stormy night. A peal of thunder announced my birth as the clock struck midnight. Born at the cusp of the witching-"

The butt of the rivet gun removes another few teeth from his increasingly sore mouth.

"You're full of shit. I know the real story, but I want to be damn sure you do, too."

A laugh of blood and acid, splashed against iron.

"After all, what good's it gonna be to kill you if you don't know why I'm doing it?"

Again, I want to do more with this one

"Where do we begin?"

"Hm... How 'bout, once upon a time?"

He laughs.

"As if!  We'll start with here and then... Then we'll get into the past."

A smile.

"Fine by me."

The crack of tensing knuckles, curling into a ball and snapping through the air with terminal force.  Bone -- a chin -- feels rough upon his skin as it slides back, turning on its neck and spinning to the ground.  A body, attached at the shoulders, brings it back up and slams it into his gut, forcing forth a sharp gasp.  His hands, though, are ready and they hold the back of the head, drive up the knee and crush the nose in a cascade of blood and broken cartilage.

Chains rattle around them as the back bumps one, it, too, bumping another and then another in a perpetual, swinging dance.  The floor rings beneath them, dints with each step in their circular pacing as they gauge one another, eyes steady and muscles become rippling waves of anticipation.  

I will do more of this later

I love fire.

Oh God, it's not just the rush of it, the heat and the light. No, it's the very concept behind it, the idea that it's the basis for everything that we call "civilization." Everything that we take for granted.

Everything that we think makes us human.

It pulsates. It is warm, but it is not alive. It nurtures life, it destroys it, but it is neither alive nor dead. It subsists on what we breathe and consumes as we do, sometimes flesh and sometimes flora. All that it lacks is a body, a form, but that's what the bottle is for, the rag flaccid with kerosene, gasoline, any-ine and every-ine, whatever we could find to feed its ravenous hunger, and the bottle only does so much to contain it.

Maybe that's why we're warm. That fire burning inside us can't be held in by flesh and bone and sinew alone. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to the fire, a bipedal moth in rancid rags. Maybe that's why I want to see it grow, spreading through rotting, dead wood and copper highways.

It tumbles through the window, a parabolic arc cut short by the floor. There's nothing, for a moment, but the flames blossom, expand and catch on the dry fuel and fill out the floor. Seconds become minutes and soon I've been there for an hour, the sirens still running strong and the metal loops tight against my wrists, constricting my blood flow.

Ugh... Fuck you, Yom Kippur

Going to try for a little more brevity on this one:

"Well."

He rolls his chin between thumb and forefinger.

"Well, well, well."

Crouching down, he scoops up a handful of salt. It's kosher salt, longer and thinner than sea salt, but still larger than table salt. It's also red. And gooey. It clumps together with the blood from which it's drawn and falls, spreading with a thick slap against the concrete.

"Adams?"

The requested aide was at the man's side in an instant.

"Y-yes?"

He cleans the blood from his hand with a kerchief and tosses it over his shoulder, where Adams scrambles to catch it before it hits the ground.

"Get a sample. I want to know, by morning, who this man was and where he'd been in the past..."

He looks to the slop at his feet and his forehead crinkles.

"Give it twelve hours to be safe."

The blood specialist pulls out his vial and a catheter and immediately sets to work getting a sample, squeezing at the corpse's exposed muscles in an attempt to coax out an uncontaminated blood vessel.

Uncontaminated... What a pain in the ass.

Watching Adams work, the thought hits him like a bullet train, turns him around and pushes him back to his car, the blue and red lights still flashing in sequence. He switches them off and pulls the assembly off of the roof, throwing it in the backseat, then backs off of the curb, sliding out into the street and turning onto the highway. Exits pass by for what seems like eternity.

It's the first one and I don't think it gets a name

Once, to fill an annoyingly specific credit requirement, I took a class about Jewish literature and civilization. We spent a lot of the early weeks, during the few sessions we had due to the intervention of the high holy days, discussing the early parts of Genesis, when that almighty deity we know and love makes man from the dust and woman from man’s rib.

Tell me, when you were little, did you have baths with your opposite sex siblings? Did you see others your age naked and notice the differences? Adam, when he first saw Eve, before he had even named her “woman,” called her “flesh of my flesh.” He went for the similarities between them, not the differences. Only when they had eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil did these become apparent, did they suddenly feel shame at their brash nudity.

And here is the point, because my teacher brought in a perspective I had never considered. It is thought that children are aware of sexuality, but nudity is not threatening to them. It is abusive sexuality that makes nudity frightening, exposing and vulnerable. Does knowledge and maturity beget this paradigm shift wherein this heinous possibility becomes an accepted facet of the human psyche?

Let’s just say I don’t enjoy night clubs as much anymore.

I can watch her dance for minutes, even hours, and her hips, though the motions are different, swing the same dance as a hundred, a thousand women before. Women, they’re called, now that their breasts bounce with each step, each jerk, each turn. Women, because their legs ache to wrap around equally insistent hips. And as I watch her, I think of the times before, when my hips quaked and our breath came ragged and hot, fits and gasps and boiling blood raging south until the inevitable came crashing down upon us, breaking in waves as we cried out in a moment of mutual connection.

Not this one, but another. Another with a name that I barely caught and a face that I hardly remember. Another with rosy lips and pale cheeks, sweet breath and soft skin. Another with vivacity, a vivid vixen. Is she just another? She sings the same siren song, playing to that weakness, charming me like a snake, and I don’t know if I want it to stop, if I don’t really want to grab her and rip her free, take her on the dance floor with the hardwood beneath us and the pulsating rhythm of the techno blasting through the bodies around us as we intertwine and our limbs interlock, hands catching and fingers twisting, breath catching and lips parting, tongues dancing and juices flowing.

How much of our nature is our own and how much is dictated for us by something like fate or genetics, something over which we have zero control? How will we truly know the answer until we take our destiny into our own hands? Her hips feel good against mine, filled with the rhythm and the flow, carrying my hips along as she rises and presses her back to my chest, takes my hands as they curve around her and rest on her belly, fingers interlocking, arms moving to cross her. As I lower my neck, crane it over her shoulder, she turns to face me and our eyes narrow, our lips touch and warmth and arousal ball together in an addictive cocktail of pleasure and excitement.