Death and collapse and futility mark the spawning season. Those with the adipose present are caught and more often slaughtered than those who lack it, creating unjust competition for the native strains who fought for generations time immemorial for their continuation. Their jaws are seen rotting in cobble or strung on trees, their gums retreating from the relentless pounding of the sun, expanding their teeth and creating thoughts of wolves and other threatened beasts to those who gaze.

Not all hope is lost for the natives. Flooding has come back to the valley via a court mandate. Although hatchery strains that the state prefers due to their gullibility and tendency to favor control benefit from the inundations as much as the natives, predatory centrarchidae that feast on ikura and fry struggle to survive in water that is not brackish and stagnant. Like all natural and manmade systems, there is no solution that doesn't reckon a price from those who benefit from it.

The water came brown and turbid and full of eighty year old sediment and with a visibility of less than two millimeters. Whatever fish were present, be they salmonidae or centrarchidae or cottidae or cyprinidae, felt their filaments be daubed with clay and rot and lead and creosote. Their eyes were blinded and no gaseous sustenance flowed to their blood and they wriggled and gulped in daring comprehension of their finality. Some of their bodies floated while others sank but either path led them to the banks and the rocks and the trees and the riparian zone of the coast fork who was splattered with their corpses in a bastard feast for crows and vultures and ants. Not since the valley was damned and Moctezuma collapsed had they seen such succulent death.

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The transient looked at the bodies of the fish. The water had risen by two feet overnight but was now dropping to a manageable wading level.The spachelating corpses were strewn on the bank with limited order and reason. Their bodies were doubled in his retinas and their spirits left and spoke words known only to the deranged. My flesh to your flesh. His false arm had been hewn to a fine point by his remaining hand. He would use it to ward off those of meat and those of air who harmed him.

He thought of the great crime the twins had committed. How he had ensured none could leave until his restitution had been wrought. How the death that was circumambient of him and everything was attestation to his strength and his requital for his tormentors and their accomplices. Earth and fate bent around his will.

He stabbed the fish with his arm and brought it to his mouth. Its stench perturbed even his manic sensations. Its eyes stared kindly and sinisterly. My flesh to your flesh. It was soft upon his tongue and tasted like his decaying stump. The truck crashed rhythmically above him and reminded him why he had to become all.

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Kendall was surprised at how little he had to pack. Some permanently stained shirts, some pants with conspicuous farming holes, various electronics soon to be scavenged for in the third world, a basketball, a speaker, letters from his ex-girlfriend. A picture of her. A grey and white portrait of her shattered child.

He looked down at the photo, his eyes honing in on the deceiving smile. Country songs that his neighbor used to strum on his guitar dominated his mind. He set the photo on the dresser then felt his pants. There was a lighter in his back pocket.

Tim and Alex were upstairs as he walked to the Kia, his suitcase draped over his shoulder. He didn't particularly want to say goodbye to either of them so he strode out the front door without glancing back. Tenacious flies hovered over the bloody footprints of Tim. His car had clay mud and clods of leaves and duffs of fir needles splattered on it and he was determined to stop by a car wash on his way back to town. He opened the Kia and felt the leather with his calloused fingertips, hoping it was comfortable enough to sleep in for the weeks or months until he found new employment.

He had always had a place to stay. Granted, it was oftentimes precarious, but there had always been a mattress, and almost always a bed frame. He supposed that living outside eventually drove people crazy, or at the very least made them more willing to compromise some of their values. Perhaps you could only survive on the streets if you were insane, and so to survive you had to consume an exorbitant amount of toxicity that allowed you to survive outdoors, but prevented you from coming back indoors. In Kansas there weren't as many homeless as there were here; although, especially in the larger cities, there were some. In New York there were plenty. Those who would be homeless in the smaller cities of Kansas usually had some sort of community. Usually a mom or dad who wouldn't let their child freeze, sometimes a fellow screw up who would let them crash in a foreclosed trap house.

He had known a couple of them. They were scraggly wiggers whose eyes flicked back and forth like they were being recorded. He would occasionally give them a pack of cigarettes or a tall boy and they would react kindly, although with undeniable suspicion. In a lot of ways, they reminded him of Alex.

The drive from Tim's farm to the country road had enough potholes to convince even the most reckless of drivers to travel slowly. Furthermore, a five meter wide swathe of it had been flooded by the dam release last night and was under roughly seven inches of water. Kendall stopped his car. The water wasn't moving, and he figured that, since his air intake valve was at the top of the engine, his Kia could survive the puddle. He drove through it, and water splashed up to the bottom of his door frame, but was not delayed. His two front tires cleared the puddle but there was a crunch, and his ignition sputtered, then the Kia died.

Kendall spent a few minutes in his Kia, trying to make it drive, then swearing when it wouldn't move. He opened the door and stepped in the puddle. Metal jabbed the sole of his boot and almost impaled him so he tread carefully. He got on his hands and knees in the muddy water and looked under the Kia. Jammed in his engine block, jammed and bending his axle, were pieces of rebar from Alex's fence that had been hidden by the water. They had been fastened together with wire from Tim's garage. His front tires had run the front part of the rebar over and this lifted the back part, which jammed his axle and ripped several wires that looked important. He swore for ten more minutes then took his suitcase out of the trunk and walked back to the house, the hairs standing on the back of his neck from the undeniable sensation of being watched.

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Alex watched Tim's stomach rise and fall as he slept from the corner of his eye. He had left his phone in his tent so he was more bored than he would like. He had checked out Tim's bookshelf but there was not much that interested him. He tried reading a book about mushroom species (assuming they were psychedelic) but found his mind drifting and failing to settle. Cringey memories replayed in his head as his eyes surveyed the pages so he set the book down and went downstairs.

Tim had almost no food in his fridge or his cabinet. Alex's stomach was shriveling and he considered stepping outside to hunt for apples. When Kendall opened the door, muddy but not out of place in the house, Alex asked why he had come back. Kendall told him about the car, and how he suspected the transient had set a trap. Alex had brought his shotgun downstairs.

" Should we hunt him?" Kendall was solemn.

" No".

" He stabbed Tim and he destroyed your car. It certainly seems like he's hunting us".

" I ain't gonna hunt nobody". Kendall rubbed his eyes.

" You ain't neither". Sleep was tempting but he had taken his phone and his luggage out of the car, and Kendall had enough drive to not succumb to it.

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Twenty miles east of Tim's Organic Produce, where Lookout Point Reservoir is now located, there had been an unremarkable village called Blakeyville. It had around thirty residents before it was inundated. Their houses had been razed beforehand, and during severe low water years (which are becoming more and more common) the foundations can be seen and explored.

Most is lost in floods. Some objects remain. Fishermen over the reservoir have reported sightings of strange objects in the water, clad in white t-shirts and rough hewn jeans, looking up mournfully. They could be the fashionings of lonely backwooders, hoping for someone to stop and listen to them. They could be scattered cloths trapped on logs and distorted by mists or sediment. They could be ghosts. Whatever they are or are not is irrelevant to those who have seen them. The perception of a hallucinator is as truthful to the hallucinator as the perception of the world is to those who don't hallucinate. The world cannot exist outside of perception for those who perceive. Only by losing perception can one observe the world as it actually is. This is done through death, or by cracking your mind through certain chemicals in such a way that there is no more perception because the one who perceived has ceased. Most is lost. But some remains.

An Irishman named William Blakey had founded Blakeyville in the mid 1800s. He had run from his homeland and had wandered the wilderness for ten years, conversing with tribes and forgetting his native Irish and his secondary english. A party of settlers took him and washed him and retaught him who he was. The wagon train stopped in a valley just below the mountain pass and he was left with orphans and lumber and a charter from a private postal company.

The indigenous told him the valley was cursed; that whatever was built could not remain, and whoever wanted to remain could not leave. They said he would become a lost soul, flitting among the trees and under the waves of the deliquesced glaciers that formed the land. He had an orphan named Jude read him the terms of the charter, and afterwards decided becoming damned was worth the risk.

He never left the valley. Parcels would come via horses and buggies, and eventually a railroad was built, but everytime he tried to leave something would go awry. The train would break down. He would become ill. His cart would get stuck in the spring mud or landslides would block the road.

The orphans grew older and then they became his laborers and his antagonizers. They would beat him and steal his wages, make him work under the hot sun then tie him in the stables when he refused or rebelled. Their hair grew as wildly as Samson's and Blakey wondered if this was his penance for sodomizing them in their youth.

There had been two girls with the other orphans. One had died in the course of birthing her first child, and the other labored with the Kalapuya, following the apple harvest, then hops, then hazelnuts. She would stop by Blakeyville twice a year to check on her bastard children, giving them pocketfuls of nuts and berries. She considered all the orphans as her husband, and when she came back they would build a bonfire, and strip naked with her, and commit depraved acts upon her and themselves.

She came to him one night. He was chained to his bed and covered in feathers and tar like a malignant bird, closer to the underworld than the above one. She put salve on his wounds and stroked his shaved head and spoke to him in a bastard mixture of Irish, English and Kalapuyan, and told him children stories she had learned from her new tribe. He was at peace when the valley was flooded by the army corps and the orphans and their children were swept away like the infectious tribes were in Noah's time and she was there, with him, stroking his head, and remains with him as their bodies rot in the aerobic water.

Perhaps no perception is as faithful to reality as perception is. Since perception is the only way to reality, when one loses perception one also loses reality, and what is objectively false becomes true. A loss of perception is a loss of faith in reality. When there is no faith, then there is no reality, so falsities and truths have an equal amount of veracity. If there are truly objective falsities, then there is a shared perception. What are we when we lose that perception? No more than ghosts in an unnamed apocalypse.

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It was just past four in the afternoon when Tim woke up. He stretched then painfully remembered his wound. He limped downstairs and had a sense of deja vu when he saw Alex and Kendall, sitting and staring at the kitchen table, still as stone markers. Kendall was looking at his phone and Alex was looking at his shotgun. Kendall was stabbing a pen into his forearm, presumably to keep himself awake.

" You boys hungry?" Neither reacted. Tim opened the fridge and saw the scarcity. He was hungry himself, but didn't want to venture outside, lest he was attacked again.

" I think I have some cans of chili somewhere". He put his arms on the stair railings and used them to slide down to the basement and emerged a few minutes later with spaghettios. As he heated them up on his gas stove he heard Kendall mumble

" What's the fuckin' point Tim?"

" What do you mean?"

" There's a crazy man after us, I can't leave this farm cause I don't got any where else to stay, what's the fuckin' point?" Alex stared at Tim. His eyes glimmered.

" We could look for him, and make him leave". Kendall scoffed.

" Then what if he comes back?"

" Then we'd make him leave again". Kendall rolled his eyes. Tim looked down at the boiling spaghetti o's, and thought of a verse from Macbeth. Double trouble, toil and bubble.

" Corella hasn't called the landline, has she?" Alex shook his head and Kendall pursed his lips.

" Could I borrow one of your phones?" Kendall gave his and Tim heard the ringing, then the This is Corella, Please leave a message then called again. And again. And again. After the fourth time he gave the phone back to Kendall.

" Probably just thinks it's a spam caller". As he was serving the spaghetti o's he was thinking of what Corella said about spiriti maligini attracting other spiriti maligni. He thought of the transient stabbing him, taking his clothes, shrieking about a stolen leg. The gleam in Alex's eye. Tim set down his spoon.

" Neither of you would happen to know any magic?" Kendall couldn't contain his snicker and was too tired to contain his words.

" That why you wanted to call Corella? For some woo woo bullshit?" Tim looked down. Thought of Kendall limping, how he mocked Tim even though Tim had cured his ailment, not that he knows that. He stared at Kendall.

" I just wanted to make sure she's safe".

" Guarantee she's safer than us. Hell, she's probably by a cozy fire, doing whatever she does", and Kendall was mad, at the transient for totaling his car, at Alex for being a sadist, at Tim for hiring him and not telling him about the mushrooms and coca trees, "maybe with one of her beaux". Tim prevented himself from reacting. He put his hands on the table.

" You slept with her?" Kendall scoffed.

" No. I don't stick my dick in crazy".

" But you know men who've slept with her?" Alex spoke before Kendall could.

" He's lying to you Tim. He's just taking it out on you because he's mad that he wrecked his car".

" I didn't wreck my car. Yall and your stupid fuckin' situation wrecked it. Hell, I wouldn't fuckin' be here if I could choose. God damn!" Tim kept his hands out on the table. He could sense by Alex's tone that he was hiding something. He hated the feeling of not knowing what everyone else knows, but surmised that he may hate the truth more. He never took his eyes off Kendall.

" Don't say that about Corella. Especially when she's not here and can't defend herself. You're welcome to stay here as long as you want, and you're welcome to keep working with me, but I won't tolerate disrespect. I recognize it's been a stressful couple of days, and I know this can have an affect on everyone. We're all hungry, and tired, and I see this. Now, what we know is that we have shelter and water, and can get food. We know this man is violent, but we also know he is severely impaired, both mentally and physically. We don't know why this man is attacking us, but we know he thinks it has something to do with the leg they probably amputated at the hospital. Now, what I think, and hear me out on this", Tim held up his hands " Is that we should kill him with kindness. Alex, you already tried shooting him, and I already tried running after him in the water, so maybe in his altered state he thinks that we're threatening him. Maybe he doesn't need to be driven off the farm, maybe all he needs is a little kindness". The sun was setting and in its final embers Kendall and Alex seemed to cast four shadows. They both objected, and told Tim he was crazy, that they either needed to leave or force him off, but Tim silenced them both, and by the end of the night persuaded and connived both into fighting the transient his way.