BY, the wind goes. Time goes. We all go by, whispers and moments that flicker and fade into the endless void. You are falling, falling slowly, as the world and everything in it topples past you into the blackness. You know not how or why, but then your thoughts rush by and you are nothing. Perhaps you always were.

Wo do. We are wo. Wo is us. Wo is you. Wo is me. Wo is everything. Wo is nothing. Wo has devoured your soul. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Whisers slip through the night. Unnoticed. They are not silent, and they are not loud, if only because they are nothing at all. Meaningless and empty and nonexistent, sliding through the shadows and then suddenly vanishing before they can slip into the sunlight. No one misses them, because they were never there.

It's so cut, she says, and we know what she means. Its pieces severed, a tear in the fabric of the universe. Fluttering edges in the temporal wind, half folded over the edge of nothingness. Peel back the wallpaper and you stare into an endless void, an abyss that howls with no voice. You scream and you, too, are cut.

It's a triger, he murmurs, raising his binoculars to peer through the tall grass of the text posts. You aren't sure what kind, but you tense, just slightly. This does not save your life when the tiger leaps out of the bush. You are not on your laptop, but in Africa. You are not alive, but now dead. Goddamn page breaks.

Sory. It is simultaneously a history and an apology, an echo of everything you have done and everything you regret. The word slips out in a quiet rush of air. Are you calling your memories or for help? No one is sure, and so no one speaks up, and the word fades to dust with the rest of us.

Mad--our minds skip over the missing 'e', our thoughts fill in the blank to fit the words into sensible patterns. Our eyes do not see the error, but perhaps it is not an error at all. Perhaps it is just her silent rage against the world shining through her notes on a quiet chatroom. Then gain, perhaps it is just a misspelling. Our minds brush over the sentence and we scroll down, burying the rage again in our empty words. It is ignored and it grows.

It, she calls herself, and then corrects her mistake. I am not an it. I am not an it. Repeating, repeating. I am I. I am she. I am human. It takes getting used to. She thought it would be other things. Muscles. Skin. Blinking. Breathing. Sleeping. Those are hard, too. But it--no, she--had always thought that she could change her way of thinking. Maybe not, maybe never. Pinocchio didn't ask the hard questions.

He was dtranfe. He looked at me, with something in his gaze, and then flew onward on his bicycle as I flew onward on mine, passing like ships in the night with only a look between us. A tiny fissure erupted in time, splintering the world between us, sucking down the normality and leaving a draft of something else, before it sealed forever and on we went. Traces of dtranfe remained in the air behind us before they dispersed and they, too, were gone forever.