I’d held off the fuckers as long as I could. These days we had to login to work at 7:30 a.m. Mondays through Fridays and not sign off before 4:30.

We supposedly could only work fully remotely three days a week now and were supposed to come into the office twice—or at least once a week—officially being there from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. during “core hours.” I myself hadn’t come in for about three weeks. Or was it four?

My productivity was still off the charts, because I was fast and nimble and very experienced with quite a bit of institutional knowledge, so there was no question about that. But my supervisor had recently warned me, “You don’t want to make the powers that be angry at you, Mark.”

“Because they are idiots?“ I wanted to ask, but I held my tongue and just nodded.

I only had seven months left to work before I retired, so I really didn’t want to piss off the execs at this point, but I also wasn’t interested in conforming to their ridiculous plans without protest.

So I did a lot of nodding these days and just did my work as quickly and as well as I could. I figured this would get them to cut me some slack, and then I could ease off into retirement, move to a place with a hammock by a lake in Florida, and leave behind working for the Man for at least a number of months, or a few years if I was lucky. Good riddance.

But that morning I got a call from the COO. I didn’t even really know what the Chief Operating Officer did in a business like ours. And, frankly, I didn’t really care.

It was 10:01 a.m. when his chat popped up on my laptop and the phone icon appeared and began ringing. I swallowed the spoonful of muesli and yogurt I’d been eating, took a sip of tea, and wiped my face with a paper towel. Then I clicked on the green answer icon.

His video came on, so I smoothed back my messy hair as best I could and clicked my video on as well.

“Mark,” he started off, “we need to resolve your absentee issues stat.”

“Well, good morning to you too, Don.”

“Yes, good morning. Now, getting back to the matter at hand, we’ve been informed that you have NOT been following our new Remote Work Policy. And that is a CONCERN.”

I could hear the capitalizations in his voice.

“And?” I asked.

“And we require that you, and all employees, start adhering to the new Policy.”

“By adhering, do you mean to say that you want me to stick to this policy like it’s some necessary glue-like substance, even though it—point in fact—would interfere with my productivity?”

“Your productivity is not an issue.”

“No,” I said, “It is not. It’s something you have been making a profit from for years, I believe, while paying me as low a salary as you can.”

“Be that as it may. We need you to start coming into the office two days a week.”

“Why?” I asked.

“We know that collaboration and culture needs to be fostered and maintained. That can’t be done when everyone is working remotely.”

“So you say.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“The last time I came into the office, everyone just stayed in their offices and working remotely from their laptops there. That’s not in-person collaboration. That’s not culture. That’s just working remotely *in* separate offices far less efficiently.”

“Well, I beg to disagree. We all need to start doing this again because this is the new direction our business is going in.”

I knew that I worked at a place that uses top-down management, where employees were in the role of children and managers were the parents. And I knew that nothing I could say would dissuade this utter dillhole.

So I said, “OK.”

He seemed to be shocked at such a quick victory. “You’ll start coming in?”

“I’ll start next week. Oh, wait, next week is my birthday and I’ve already scheduled a few days off. So the week after is when I’ll start.”

“That’s acceptable,” he said. “Thank you.”

“No, Don, thank you. Have a good one.”

He kind of harumphed before we ended the call. I knew that the week after my birthday was the week of July 4th, where we all had two days off, so I could easily parlay that into yet another week of only working remotely.

So that was another three good weeks of remote working while I didn’t have return to the office to follow their ludicrous new policy. Since I was now in the calendar mode of a short timer, scratching off one day at a time, I counted that as a win.

One day at a time. That’s how it really works anyway, always only in the ever present now.

Tossing and turning throughout the night,

we knew that something wasn't quite right.

The mosquitoes were flapping their weary wings.

The sky was the color of dirty string.

A thunderstorm was supposed to be rolling in.

We felt like we'd been trapped inside our skin.

The air was so hot, it hurt to breathe.

There was nothing we could do that would relieve

the particular combo of humid heat

that started that day with no relief.

When the power went off, we threw up our hands

feeling like we didn't understand.

The weathermen later informed us that

a "heat burst" had almost knocked us flat.

We didn't know then and we don't know now

what they mean by that new term anyhow.

Suffice it to say that the climate we feel

eventually is going to truly reveal

how each of the beings upon this earth

contributes their deepest inner worth.

We finally arose at five in the morning.

Exhausted and damp, we read the warnings

that excessive heat would follow for days.

So we took cool showers and went on our ways.

maybe today I’ll take none of the stupid pills

they’ve prescribed for me

and none of the ragtag ones

I’ve just added on because I’ve heard

they’re good for people in my condition

that is, aging closer towards the irreversible

cessation of all biological functions

sustaining the bodily organism

funny that, despite the plethora of aches

and the creeping ennui,

I feel freer than I ever have

perhaps love itself will keep growing

and will eventually expand larger

than this apparent universe

perhaps every feeling of joy

is really always maximal, infinite, eternal

perhaps we all have flown out of the

butts of monkeys themselves into an existence

that goes into multitudinous dimensions

the likes of which it is up to us to explore

I could smell her wet, musky scent in the back of my throat as she aimed the pistol between my legs. Her luxurious wild beauty made my bleeding guts ache even more as the moon reflected off the gun’s high-polish finish.

Yet, sap that I am, I still wanted to hold her in my arms, even through the shocking realization that she’d just told me she truly despised me before she’d shot me in the belly.

I was fading and couldn’t understand why this had happened. There was no life flashing before my eyes. There was just: Why? How did I get everything so wrong?

Time slowed down. And on the tail end of my great confusion was a little tug, a little pull in another direction. A distracting feeling that became clearer and closer and realer as the rest of my awareness dimmed and drew towards a close.

I remembered us before. Not this life before, but in a different times and places where we were soldiers feasting on stew and fish sauce and householders growing rice in Asia. Slaves and slaveholders, lovers and rivals. Our lifetimes blended together from the same swirl.

And as I saw her squeezing the trigger again, I said, “I’ll be the one holding the weapon next lifetime. Bet on it.”

Quite inadvertently, you see,

I put the chicken bones in my tea.

And later, when I’d lost all that I’d known,

I found them lying on my phone.

The bones and marrow, straight and narrow,

caught in my craw until I saw

that I couldn’t help but dwell in hell

as far and wide as I could smell.

She’d been my lady and always cooked

with chicken until I got hooked.

And now I really, really miss her

and dream that, as I try to kiss her,

the goddess of my destiny

will finally come right back to me.

But the chicken bones have turned to stone

and, woe is me, I’m all alone.

The unbelievably rotten stank of the alien’s physiology sifted through the breeze outside the crashed capsule, getting up into my nasal passages like a thick and cloying fog. I knew it would take days to wash out, maybe weeks.

The alien’s oily, gray skin and vermilion eyes in its tiny, crouched body didn’t help one bit. It was panting and panicked, its extraordinarily large peepers darting around in abject fear.

“Okay, little buddy,” I said, “everything’s going to be cool,” knowing full well that wasn’t true. Sometime very soon this little technologically advanced critter would be laying on a gurney in some secret hospital being cut apart and photographed by doctors and military people.

I had about five minutes to complete my current assignment. I searched the iPhone strapped to my hand—invisible to everyone else in this time besides myself—for some background data. But, even with the supposedly new open access to UFO records, I couldn’t find jack.

There was nothing like this crash for 1984 of any significance anyplace south of the border and certainly no reports about little, gray beings running around stanking up the alleyways or arroyos of this town.

I coughed and sort of gagged, almost throwing up in my mouth from the stench, before I went on.

“Can you understand me?” I asked.

*Help, please. Us help. Please.*

Christ on a corndog! Telepathy? I hadn’t been trained in that. Why hadn’t they sent back a psychic or a certified remote viewer? They usually just assigned agents like me back for a year to mop up accidental, dangerous spills and unfortunate, way-too-early knowledge.

“How can I help?” I asked, honestly.

*Undo future as past. Undo crash only land. Undo taking away, pushing. Don’t cut apart, don’t cut apart, don’t cut apart…*

That’s when I heard the sirens approaching. Fucking A.

“I’m sorry to have to do this, little guy, but I think this is a hard reset situation. I’m a short-timer only here for a year, but they have included a reset app on this phone.”

*No phone. Reset no. Must survive to show. Must show all.*

“Sorry, man. We can’t risk it. This is the year it all goes south. That’s why they sent us back.”

*No south. No go. Only be…*

Two vehicles, lights flashing and sirens deafening, skid to a stop as I pressed the red button on the app.

*No! Here to help. Nooooooo…*

The Egyptian slug swaggered with all of his baggage

down roadways of sand, his holy Ka ragged.

He didn’t have funds for a tomb full of wheat,

but the honey-laced beer smelled mighty sweet.

He swallowed his fear for the joy of creation

yet had no carvings to show his name or his station.

As they wrapped him in linen and threw on the salt,

he reviewed his life and found all his faults.

He’d sought many pleasures and smoked like a fish

and made lots of art, almost everything he’d wished.

It finally dawned on him as it all became clear:

it wasn’t about the wrappings, the wheat, or the beer.

His soul had a goal of traveling beyond

by virtuous trips around this glorious mound.

If Osiris granted him the way out of strife,

he’d move into the groove of a full afterlife.

If not, he’d be devoured by the goddess’ teeth

before his soul could grow beyond that particular belief.

Neanderthal gals are lovely to see

with blessings caressing the great Mystery.

They're fierce, but they're true,

and they cook up a storm.

And their hearts lead the way

ever since they've been born.

It's closing on night, and the moon's rising high,

as Neanderthal gals reach into the sky.

He didn’t really know what it meant, since he had never used the application before. There was something about picking a writer and collaborating and winning badass hundred dollars PayPal/Venmo/whatever, and he thought, *this is intriguing*.

But he couldn’t get the backspace or delete key to work on his iPad in the app, and he didn’t know what Discord (apparently another app) was, so he was getting frustrated, but that’s when Chia the goat stuck her head in the door as asked, “Just what’s the problem here? Just write. Write your haaaaaaart out.”

So he did. He kept writing and writing and writing, and when he looked up nothing was left except the opening wide open wide open wide open outshining of the universe and time and space disappeared in an instant.

I live in a tiny house in east Austin with a couple of goats. I was deeply exploring non-dualistic reality when the juice apparently turned off, so—unlike all the rest of you zombies throughout the world—I didn’t really know anything until quite a bit later when I got up off of my cushion to brew some tea.

I was once told by a fellow writing student that I “have an imagination like a rabbit in a briar patch.”

However, this time my imagination failed.

It was still relatively early in the day, and I thought a circuit breaker had blown. But when I stepped outside and looked around the street I saw people were in front of their houses moving their arms and faces around like there was trouble. And then I saw what I thought was a plane or a helicopter drop ever so slowly from the sky into a field way down the block.

There was something wrong with it. It had a strange glimmering off-violet color and moved in odd slow, jerking motions. And then things snapped in place, and I realized that’s no plane or copter, Bubba. We are being visited.

I went back inside my place, and of course almost nothing worked with no electricity, no internet, no nothing.

The only device I had that still retained a small charge was this old-model iPad that I’m writing on now. There’s just about 5% charge left, so I’m not pausing very often or editing much of what I write here.

I’m just trying to get it all down. I don’t know if anyone will ever read it. I don’t know if anyone could ever read it with no power to-

Uh oh. It looks like a red message about the battery is warning me to plug-in before