1. A single, static frame of a caterpillar resting on a sun-dappled leaf, little bits of green nibbled out of its heart into a lace design.

   
   

2. In the parking lot of the shopping mall, Ashley says to Rowan, “We should become better people. We should nurture virtue.”
   

3. A birthday cake for a five-year-old, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-themed, with a single bite clearly taken out of the bottom left-hand corner.
   

4. A man and woman embracing on a white-sand beach, their eyes filled with pools of ardent love.
   

5. On the balcony of their apartment, Rowan says to Ashley, “I’m directing a movie, have I told you.”
   
   Ashley passes the cigarette back to her. It is late at night, and there’s a tremor of unease in the guts of the city.
   
   “You haven’t,” says Ashley. “What’s it about?”
   
   “It’s about a Roman centurion who falls in love with the wild-eyed magic man Jesus of Nazareth. He is torn between his duty to keep order in Judea and the affection both carnal and spiritual he feels for this rabble-rouser who threatens the security of the Empire’s hold in the region.”
   
   “A swords-and-sandals flick. Sounds expensive.”
   
   “Yes,” Rowan says, dropping the butt of the cigarette in the soil of a long-dead potted plant. “It will require some wealthy backers.”
   
   “Good thing an uncontroversial flick like that one is pretty much a guaranteed hit,” says Ashley.
   

6. A semi-truck carrying baby diapers on a lonely strip of highway through western badlands swerves to avoid a brownish hare and her brood trying to cross the road. Due to the sudden jerky movement, the semi’s tires lose traction and cause the vehicle to go spinning off into the dry, cracked earth on the roadside, littered with the refuse of family vacations and fellow long-haul truckers and midnight tweakers.
   
   When the semi finally comes to a halt in a cloud of pale dust, the driver emerges, shaken, to assess the damage. Satisfied that his truck is still road-worthy, he then checks the highway, and is dismayed to find that the mother hare has died, possibly from the shock of the whole thing, and her cottony brownish children have gathered around her, oblivious.
   
   In the distance, thunder.
   

7. Various revelations both real and imagined. The nightly march of dreams. Intangible shorelines off on the horizon. Beautiful vibrant hopes circling morning drains alongside flecks of fluoride and spittle.
   

8. A mass shooting occurs inside a JCPenney in Fort Worth, Texas. The shooter kills eight people, including himself, and wounds two others. His weapon is an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle purchased by him three weeks earlier with the intention of committing murder. At his home in the suburbs, police find his mother, dead, and his wife, whom he thought he had killed, in critical condition. In the parking lot of the JCPenney, police locate the shooter’s van, which he used in his work as an electrician, and which is full of materials for creating improvised explosives. A manifesto left on the shooter’s laptop covers wide-ranging but ultimately banal topics. These topics include white supremacy, a distrust of the current government, cancel culture as the modern-day gulag, the feminization of the American male, and an intense suspicion that reality is not what it seems, that the truth is in fact obfuscated day in and day out by an elite aristocracy consisting of producers of liberal media and the ultra-wealthy. The shooter’s wife, a bartender, had contacted police two days before the shooting to say that she feared for her life, because her husband, despite having recently sobered up, seemed to be getting angrier and angrier with each passing day, and the presence of his recently-purchased automatic rifle seemed to hang over her head. The police made a visit to the house that night, to get a measure of the situation. They arrived to find husband and wife in the midst of making tacos and listening to Fleetwood Mac, and though the would-be shooter was upset at their intrusion initially, he calmed down and spoke with the officers, going so far as to plead to his wife for forgiveness as they watched. His wife simply kept repeating how embarrassed she felt for even calling them.
   
   In the aftermath of the shooting, a twelve-year-old boy was found to be missing. With the help of store staff searching for over half an hour, his unharmed but shocked mother was finally reunited with him. He had run into the nearest fitting room, the ladies’, and was found lying in the fetal position under a wooden bench, his face calm and his eyes wide as two full moons.
   

9. A viral photo of a fully nude, middle-aged white man seated in an Arby’s dining room and eating what is clearly a sandwich from Subway.
   

10. Richard Milhouse Nixon sitting in hell, playing “Chopsticks” on an out-of-tune upright piano, while two nasty little imps sit on the floor ripping pages out of The Bhagavad Gita. The audience laughs. They get it.
    

11. “Sometimes I feel like I’m a being made of pure, infinite light,” says Rowan. “And then other times I feel like I’m that weird fish people kept posting in like 2016. I think it’s called a blobfish. You know the one that’s just, like, deflated and slimy and sad-looking?”
    
    “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” says Ashley.
    
    They’re on the rooftop at Club Collins looking down at the city, passing a vape pen back and forth. Somewhere under their feet, dance music is throbbing. A crescent moon occasionally pokes through purplish night-clouds. Rowan’s vibe has been off all day.
    
    “Your vibe has been off all day,” says Ashley.
    
    “I know,” says Rowan.
    
    “How’s the movie coming? The Jesus flick?”
    
    “Production is moving at a glacial pace. One of the backers I had to turn to was, regrettably, my father.”
    
    “Isn’t he a preacher? In like the Northwestern Episcopalian Conference?”
    
    “It’s the Southern Baptist Convention, and yes. As I expected, he has some reservations about the content of the film, specifically the juxtaposition of Christ and homosexuality. But I’ve explained to him: in no way will my film insinuate that Christ was anything other than celibate. Jesus isn’t even in most of the scenes, except briefly in passing, or just the back of his head, or in a couple of scenes very far off in the distance while speaking to the masses. I’ve told my father that the focus of this film is the love-stricken centurion, and the inner battle he must wage between his loyalty to his empire and his men, and the sincere, transcendent love he feels for this young Jewish teacher. Which, as I believe the film will argue, is itself a microcosm of modern Christianity’s identity crisis, as it is now torn between its status as the new Roman empire, the new world power desperate to control the hearts and minds and morality of its 2.5 billion believers, and the subversive ethos upon which it was founded: the dictates of love which demand they put the last first and care for the downtrodden and oppressed.”
    
    “And what does your father say about that?”
    
    “What do you think? He’s hung up on the depiction of gay love, can’t get past it. And so I tell him: what else can you possibly call The Last Supper and ‘eat of my flesh’ but a full-throated endorsement of embodied, sexual love—regardless of gender—being central to the Christian faith?”
    
    Over in the corner, a group of young women sit in a circle around a chalk pentagram they’ve drawn. Using the flashlights on their cellphones in lieu of candles, they begin to seek communion with the spirit of Kurt Cobain.
    

12. Roving gangs of cannibal marauders in the long, starved shadows of the dead trees. The whistling of the wind underneath doors and down through the empty skyscraper canyons. A crayon drawing of a mushroom cloud on the onion-yellow wallpaper of a house with all the windows blown out. Sweaty-browed politicians delivering stirring speeches from their underground bunkers. A forest fire in Colorado that never goes out. The island nation of New York recognizes the speaker from the Freest Republic of Texarkana Brought to You By the Coca-Cola Company. A feeling of unease for those of us with functioning eyesight. A fatigue deep in the bones. Mountains crumbling into the sea. A splotch of semen on a cracked LED screen. 7 Ways to Elon Musk a Million Impressions in One Incel-lite AI Habits For Your Man to BLOW YOUR Easiest Game PLAY NOW For Free!!
    

13. The scene is a deathbed scene, in a room lit only by the rose-colored light of the fading sun through the window. Margaret has come to say goodbye to Monalisa, who is dying of a disease for which we don’t yet have a name. Monalisa is clearly older than Margaret, but doesn’t look of an age to be dying naturally.
    
    Margaret sits in a chair at the bedside. Her hands are clasped around Monalisa’s. Both women have tears in their eyes.
    
    “And to the zoo,” Monalisa is saying, “I am leaving a hefty sum, on the condition that they finally teach their Bengal tigers how to eat with a knife and fork. It is high time they were taught some table manners.”
    
    Margaret nods, solemn. “Yes,” she says, "yes, very good, very good. Tell me, how does your soul feel? Is it heavy? Would you like me to turn on a lamp so you can see your dying better?”
    
    “And to my nephews, Tim and Tom, I leave my collection of erotic FMV games. They shall be kept in a safe deposit box until they’re both eighteen.”
    
    “Such a scene,” says Margaret, “such a scene. The bequeathal. The withdrawal from worldly possessions. The letting go. How am I going to manage life without you, Mona? What kind of a life can I possibly have after you’re gone?”
    
    “And to my mailman, Roger, I leave my alligator skin purse. That’ll eat him up, haha.”
    
    In the corner of the room sits an old Victrola spinning Marvin Gaye’s classic What’s Going On but in reverse. A titmouse hiding underneath the bed is humming along.
    

14. It it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it.
    

15. Rowan says to Ashley, “You’ve changed.”
    
    Ashley says, “I know. I think it has something to do with an argument I got into recently with my younger sister.”
    
    Rowan watches Ashley’s face in the bathroom mirror from behind her, arms crossed in the doorway. As is her habit sometimes, she briefly considers how she would capture this shot with a camera. Ashley is attempting to pop a pimple perched angry and scarlet on the gentle curve of her chin.
    
    “What did Abby have to say this time?”
    
    “The usual sob story. Our family dog—well, my parents’ dog, really—he died. And my sister called me heartless for not reaching out to them, and not going back home to console them.”
    
    “She loves your parents in a way that’s inaccessible to you,” says Rowan, looking down at her feet and contemplating a bath. Being known this well by someone gives Ashley a feeling of deep and abiding warmth, similar to the feeling of waking freezing in the night and pulling the blankets over herself with a sigh of relief—the deep gratitude she always has for the existence of blankets in that moment.
    
    “You would think we were raised in two different homes, by two different sets of parents. They terrorized us, but you’d never know that looking at her. They bought her a car senior year. Right before I moved to New York my mom sent me an email full of rape statistics.”
    
    Then “Ah!” from Ashley as the pimple finally squashes to soft yellow wax in between her fingernails.
    

16. Aren’t you tired of this? Aren’t we all tired of this?
    

17. Two military humvees. A child’s candy necklace. A chocolate bar. A miniskirt. A Desert Eagle. A fan club. An Iron Maiden song. The sound of bagpipes in the distance. The Book of Ecclesiastes. Earwax on Q-Tips in the trash. A grinder full of cannabis buds. A tower reaching all the way to heaven. A mismatched pair of socks. A trampoline covered in petroleum jelly. A butterfly knife. A pair of Groucho glasses. “LOSER” written in permanent marker. The greenest pair of eyes you’ve ever seen. An invitation to Bingo night.
    

18. “And to my first ex-husband, Richard, I leave my lump of bodily guilt currently valued at over $10,000. To my second ex-husband, Monty, I leave a copy of Catcher in the Rye that I was led to believe had been signed by J.D. Salinger but upon further inspection was found to be signed by D.B. Cooper, baffling both myself and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To my third ex-husband, Richard (The Second), I leave my collection of exotic Parisian underwear woven of the same black silk used in Donatella Versace’s mourning veil worn by her at her brother’s funeral.”
    

19. One fall day, the does and the bucks come to a collective agreement that enough is finally enough. Banding together into several small armies, they storm the hunting lodges, they storm the gun ranges, they storm the field supply stores, the satanic Bass Pro Shop pyramid in Memphis TN, the department stores, various outlets and stations belonging to the Fox Corporation, various Fraternal Order of Polices, churches hosting father-and-son events and men’s outings, regional gun shows, the homes of Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken (for reasons not totally clear at first), The Ohio State University’s football stadium (due to a tragic misunderstanding), and several Elk Lodges (again, due to a misunderstanding). They kill the hunters in their day-glo vests, they kill the hunters in their homes asleep beside their wives (they have a good memory for faces, deer, as it turns out). They break the shotguns and rifles beneath their hooves, they destroy the machinery of the gun factories. The humans fight back, of course, as they must, as it is their instinct to do. But the deer make sure that for every hooved life lost, two bipedal lives go down with them. They are ruthless and filled with holy anger. When pressed about their killings on the evening news, spokesdeer use the term “overpopulation” and say very solemnly that these are killings done out of benevolence, out of concern for the human ecosystem, their dwindling natural resources.
    
    When they grow tired of bloodshed, the deer approach the humans with a proposal for their surrender. The humans quickly agree, and conditions are set: the deer will go back into the wild, the humans back to their shelters of stone, and no human will ever step foot in the forest again. There is only one exception: every summer, the humans must send one thousand of their children into the forest, there to reside until the summer of their eighteenth year, so that the deer may teach them how to love the wild things again and reject the human instinct for violence and vanity. The hope is that in a few generations, the deer may have supplanted the lust for hunting so long treasured by humankind, and that one day, the human race may even look back at the slaughtering of animals altogether as an example of unrestrained barbarism from a darker era of history.
    

20. Please record your message at the tone.

Jared Sebastian was born and raised in southeast Michigan and graduated from Western Michigan University. He was the recipient of WMU’s 2017 Gwen Frostic Award for Undergraduate Fiction, and his work has previously appeared in WMU’s The Laureate, Funicular Magazine, and Z Publishing House’s Emerging Writers series. Jared works as a copywriter, and in his free time, he’s either making his way through an ever-growing TBR list, improvising terrible love songs on his Casio keyboard, or struggling to write at least one page a day.

X: @jared_seabass

IG: @medijare4all