“Et tu brute?” was written in blood on the wall dripping crimson drops onto the ash.  The hairbrush was all that was left, and now it was covered in vomit.

            Scott fumbled with the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket.  He flicked the Bic lighter, fully engulfing the butane and quickly inhaled in on the tar paper.

            The scene was nearly too much for him to handle.  Scott pulled back his hair in a pony tail and looked back down at the ground… Out came the notebook as he scribbled down the contents of the room as quickly as possible:  

• Hairbrush
• Faded Newspapers
• Empty Diet Soda Can
• Shards of Glass

            There was a feeling, an overwhelming sense that something big was going to happen soon.  Something important was going to happen, and perhaps the world was about to go to war.  Casey didn’t know for what, things seemed peaceful, albeit dull, throughout the land.  The lack of rainfall seemed to be the only true malady throughout the land as of late.

            Scott bit his lower lip, “There’s one more thing…” He kicked away the newspaper and vomited again.  “I thought there wasn’t anything left…” It looked like relish, and it was covering the charred remains of a human hand.

            “Jesus Christ.” A voice from behind Scott belted out.

            “I thought I’d seen it all, it’s just so…”

            Little did Casey know that the fragile link that held this world together was about to break.   Everything was going to change…

            The man behind Scott sidestepped the remains to address him, “Fucking hell, the newspapers will crucify us if we don’t announce that we know who the responsible party is, preferably already after the suspect is in our custody.”

            A woman spoke up, “We could just keep it hush hush?”

            Scott looked dejected before he spoke, “Keep a SHC case quiet?  That’s likely!”

            The other man pulled off his hat and dusted it off, “We did it before.”

            “WHAT?!?” Scott and the woman asked in unison.

            “Don’t act so surprised.  Fifteen years ago…”

            “Aristotle is not diadactic,” The Osper stated forcefully to the crowd of adolescent youth sitting in front of him.  Casey tried his best to sneak into the seminar without being noticed by the rest of the crowd.  He utterly failed.  The Osper continued his discussion, “It is not preachy, it is not about making one a better person.  That is more in the realm of Plato and his Republic especially in the second and third books.  It would behoove you to re-acquaint yourselves with these sections, where he discusses when one can gain personal knowledge through poetry.”

            “You see, this here is the journal that we found.  It’s illegible, most of it.  Rantings, ravings, you know this guy wrote about his recurring nightmares?  It’s pretty wild.”  Hailey closed the book with one hand. 

            Winthrop looked over at him, “So?  He’s not doing so well now.”

            Detective Hailey diligently thought before he spoke, “He had nightmares about unicorns.”

The crew would have laughed had the dead man not been charred from what appeared to be the inside out.  He was clutching something.
























            Casey already regretted coming here.  He wished he was still outside in the rain with the branch.  He was lost in the discussion of philosophy and poetry.  The great high arts, to which anyone must apply to not only understand, but fully control.  He wanted to go into the sciences.

             Special detective Sharon Dunbar knew she shouldn’t but she pried the corpse’s hand open nevertheless.  Glass shards fell to the polished wooden floor with a tinking sound.  Before the sound, she realized her folly.

             “Just what in the blazing fuck were you thinking, Dunbar?

“I simply… something got the better of me,” she took a deep breath, “I guess.”  She tugged on her ears as if her non-extant earrings were itchy.




























             The Osper faded back into Casey’s head, “What are these layers?  Legend has no real complication or depth of plot, according to scholars.  It’s all foreground, and no background.”

             “Seven dollars.  That’s all he had on him.  It’s a damn shame you would have thought he would have had more.  Lt. Nale slipped the four other bills in the wallet into his own back pocket.  “This never happened, okay?”  Nale lit a cigarette and threw it on the newspaper stack on the kitchen table.

            Hailey did a double take at the situation, “Sir, isn’t this…”

             The Osper was legitimately stunned by the question, “You raise an interesting point.  I shall have to think myself about that in private and reflect on a proper response.  In the meantime, this conversation is over for now.  Please go now in peace to understand not only your surroundings but those around you.”

             “Sure as hell it’s arson.  This is going to be easier than explaining ourselves to the Feds.  It’ll just look like a regular fire.  I’ll come back tomorrow to investigate with some of you.  We’ll file a report that someone anonymously tipped us that they spotted a fire in this house.  I’ll remove the accelerant and we’ll just say it was a suicide.”

            The room was already getting smoky and the team stepped out of the front door, Detective Sharon Dunbar being told to close it at the behest of Lt. Nale.

             The rest of the crowd slowly poured out of the room.  Osper was somehow the last one out.  The Osper asked him to stop.  “Why did you come to this talk today?”

“I know not, Master Osper.  It was raining, and I was just… compelled to hear you speak.”

            























            “Do you want to have kids someday, Nelly?”

            “Brad, what do you mean?  Of course I do!  Not now, not for years… Maybe a decade or so, but yes, eventually.  I’d like to have three or four, or maybe five.

            “That’s a lot.  I don’t know if I could handle that many in one house at one time.  I’m not even sure if I could… I mean I could potentially be a terrible father.”

The Osper tugged at his own beard, and eyed Casey, “You don’t know why you came here.  And yet you missed the introduction and the main portion of the discussion. Why bother?”

“I apologize for interrupting.  I do not have a concise answer for you.  I am just worried, I hear things, and thought that maybe you would be able to provide some answers.   I promise not to attend unannounced again, Master Osper.  A thousand apologies.”

            “Brad! What are you talking about?”

            “Well I dunno.  I don’t have much to base it around.  My family, you know, the father. Erm. My father wasn’t exactly Atticus Finch. Or even Homer Simpson for that matter.”

            “Huh?”

The windowpanes shook from the wind outside.  Casey flinched and nearly jumped.  The Osper was eying him the entire time, trying to understand why this boy had come to his discussion.  Could this have been what he was waiting for?  It was time to begin the tests.

            “What I mean is that although I’m sure my dad loved me, he didn’t express it very well.  Actually hardly at all in fact.”

            “So you think that you won’t be a good father because your dad didn’t express his feelings towards you?”

“Your name is Casey, right?”  He shook his head in acknowledgement.  “Alright then, answer a few questions for me.  It’s the duality of having free-will and knowing that either through destiny, fate, or a lack of faith, that they already know the path you would follow and planned their actions accordingly. Complexity and clarification are the two worlds at odds here.  They each have their own ideas their own ideal, in an extreme way.  Do we live in a secular society?”       

“I think so.”

            “Well it’s not just that, it’s that his interest level in me was erratic, although generally staying somewhere between low and non-existent.  When he did have something to say, it was usually a putdown, and not what I’d consider encouragement.”

            “So you think that you’ll act like that, like him, to your kids?”

“Why then, are there so many biblical allegories still being made then?  Do you feel well represented through sacred texts, or do you feel so removed that… You don’t even have a full beard yet!”

“A beard?  But I’m only…”

            “It’s really all I’ve known, and it’s just a fear of mine, I guess… I’m afraid that things like that might be in my blood, and I can’t escape that fate.”

            “You can’t honestly believe that, Brad.  You might have grown up in those circumstances, but look at you now, you are a really smart and caring guy.  If anything, now you know what NOT to do in those situations, right?”

“You don’t have to explain your physical shortcomings and immaturity to me.  History does not wait for anyone, it is the story in which we live.  It is up to you, the disposition of your soul is up for stake here.”

Casey gulped, “What is a soul?”

“It is something that you have, the most powerful thing there is.”

            “I guess so Nelly. I’m tired though, and I don’t feel like walking back.”

            “Say no more.  You’re the best teddy bear I’ve ever had!”

“Do you mean knowledge?” Casey paused, noting his error, he took a deep breath, and then cleared his throat, “A means of communication?”

“It’s unification of the masses via…  I must depart.  Meet me here tomorrow at the same time. Make haste, and do not be late again.”  And with that, the Osper was gone.

Adeline pushed back her dirty blonde hair and sighed, “But why Mom?  Why can’t I have a birthday? I’m going to be ten! That’s a big event! Double digits!  It’s only a couple days away!”

Her mother looked up from the small mountain of dishes that were trying to surface from the soapy depths of the Dawn-infested water.  She brushed off the sweat from her forehead with her arm in an awkward motion, and then turned around to face her nine-year-old daughter.  “Honey… you know that money has been tight since your father went away.”

Casey tried to piece together how the most recent events unfolded.  He didn’t really intend to attend the talk, it was seemingly a fluke that he was there at all, Master Osper seemed like he knew that he would arrive, in some way.  His head thought from thinking too much, and he went to bed early for the first time in years. 

            “Dude, you need to chill, I want to be cool with you and Nelly. Why do you put me in the middle of this? I didn’t ask for this.  I want to be friends with both of you. Doing drugs, smoking, doing all this shit, what are you trying to prove?”

            Brad continued to stare at the ground… “I’m not doing fucking anything. I mean, I’m not trying to do anything. God, fuck you.”  He kicked the dirt, moving a small cloud around.  “I don’t do drugs, anyhow. Smoking is not a drug.”

When he awoke the next day, he prepared himself to be there on time.  After a discussion on tropes and figures, The Osper motioned him to come to the backroom of the auditorium.  “Welcome back Casey, I hope I didn’t frighten you yesterday with our initial meeting.  Let me quell your fears for a bit.  Yes, I knew you would attend the discussion, in fact, you were earlier than I imagined, I figured that you would enter the building as everyone else was exiting.”

“But how…”

Scott couldn’t believe what he had just witnessed.  A fifteen-year-old coverup, for a mysterious death?  How could he be so naïve?

“That’s a discussion for another day.  Yesterday we left off speaking of your adolescence.  Even a pawn can be important in a chess game, remember.  What is universal to one is not necessarily ‘universal’, as they say, to everyone.  Personal bias will plague and cloud people’s minds because the revolutionary, evolutionary truth is a tabla rasa. 

“Sweetie, I have a surprise for you!”

            Am I going to have a party?” The words seemed to rush together into a single syllable from the precocious nine-year-old’s mouth.  Her daughter’s doe-like eyes grew even brighter.  “Mom?”

“Yes Addy. There’s no surprising you, I guess.”  She could see a smile forming on her own mouth. It had been too long since she had an honest reason to do so.

“A what?”

He saw a couple across from him, only fifty feet away, talking to girls sticking their head out of the apartment building’s windows.  He could see them moving their mouths, but he couldn’t ascertain what they were saying.  It got cold. Real cold. Real fast. Brad found it hard to breathe.  He could finally hear the couple now. They were screaming, screaming for the girl to come down.  No, there were two girls in the window, but now there was only one.

“A clean slate, a mind not yet filled with any ideas, much less conflicted ones.”

            Did the other girl fall out of the window? Brad frantically looked around, he couldn’t see her, he guessed that he was fine.  Well not fine, he had a shortness of breath in addition to the other symptoms.  He started to walk towards the ATM, he was only a few hundred feet away. He got closer, he finally made it inside the glass enclosure.  There were two other people there, there were four machines though.  They just stared at him.  Brad didn’t know why they were staring at him.  He was still cold, he could feel the goosebumps rise all over his body.  Sweat poured down his face. Now he understood why they were staring.

“Is that why I am here?  You think I have a table rasa – an empty brain?”

            Brad inserted his card into the ATM machine and punched in his PIN.  He tried to remember what he wanted to do. He forgot if he was trying to put in or take out money.  He decided just to print out a statement.  The ATM machine displayed an error, and Brad was too busy with other things to be all that flustered. He merely hit cancel and the machine spit out his card.  Now walking was becoming unbearable, as he made his way down the stairs to the ground level next to the credit union.  He needed a drink. No, he needed water, no he needed rest.  No he needed to sit down, and he found a bench that was unoccupied. He sat there, just staring at the ground in silence for another twenty minutes.

“Far from it.  I think you underestimate your own…”  Master Osper trailed off on his own accord.

“Hooray!” Adeline seemed to bounce off of every surface in the cramped studio apartment all at once.

“Honey, I even made little invitations for your friends. I figure that you can invite six of your friends.  There are directions to our apartment here on the back.  She handed her daughter the handmade cards that she made late the night before out of sky blue construction paper.  It was written with a Sharpie marker.

The girl’s naïve look switched to that of puzzlement, “But Mom, I thought you said there wasn’t enough space here.”

Casey was growing impatient with the riddles, “My what?”

“Addy, they are only meeting here, the party is going to be somewhere else. Somewhere special.”  Special because she hadn’t figured out where that was going to be just yet.  She couldn’t afford to float for the Kid’s Fun Center, or whatever the chain with the people dressed up as oversized animals with the ball pit was called.  She had one more day to figure that out.  She was working on borrowed time, but she knew that somehow it would work out. At least she prayed that it would.

The Osper shifted topics and begin talking of vats and the existential condition.  Implications were brought forth from science and proto-science.

The Osper reigned in the conversation some minutes later, “There isn’t necessarily a redemption here for anyone.  This isn’t some epic story whereby two primal groups compete for what they assume is the best ideal.” 

Bargain.  Bargain price for some bargain music.  Cheap thrills through a hi-fi.  Sifting through the CDs, Brad often wondered why people went to flea markets.  It was almost a spiritual experience to go there on weekends.  They were such easily justified means, he went back to his search.  What exactly was he looking for?  Redemption.  Chances are, if one found that here, you could haggle the price down to around half of what the seller was originally asking for.  Cracked.  The cases were not exactly in pristine condition. 

Casey needed to drink something, his mouth was starting to dry, his eyes starting to water.  He felt uncomfortable and couldn’t explain to himself why.

“Ancients, with their own time, geographic and cultural differences, are all pulled together with a common thread.  With the authority they speak with, you know they have their own political agenda.  Theoretical theory, their globalization is a rationalization that is bursting forth from these passages.  Grounding from very small snippets, our basis of knowledge… It is not only possible that our way of thinking is wrong, it is probably statistically flawed nearly to it’s core.  You, Casey, must ‘choose your own path’, as some would say.”

Brad was told not to judge a book by its cover.  But if the case itself was marred, what would be said for the media inside of it?  The smell of tobacco mixed with incense permeated the entire building.  A sense of cheapness, of lurid, dank, stuffy basements stocked to the ceiling with boxes full of junk came to mind.  They came here to spend their money, to buy and sell that junk, their "wares."  Or was it more than that?  Brad’s eyes roved over this particular vendor's table, with his items for sale.  A beat up acoustic guitar and two tattered black leather jackets.  These jackets looked as if they had seen better days at least a decade before Brad’s birth.

Casey looked up at Master Osper with reddened eyes, “But how will I decide the appropriate course of action?”

“My guidance, my help is more than likely to be marred by my own plan, my course of action, my intent is of course, not without its own bias.  In some ways, it is best to be a novice in this inquiry.  The range of information and the breadth of the interpretations possible.  There is a virtue to be able to be self-conscious of the work.  Many years were spent preparing for this.”

            Brad removed himself from that area.  What did use did Brad really have for CDs anymore? He wondered if he would find the next big thing in those old shoeboxes full of music?  The chances of that happening were roughly the same as someone purchasing a Bentley sedan here for under a grand.  Whispers.  The hawks came here early and left last.  Why you ask?  They came here to scope out the building, all the vendors and their precious "wares," see what they are peddling so that they have an idea of what they want.  Then, they wait around for the remainder of the day, whispering to each other and smoking unfiltered cigarettes.  When it is nearly time for the place to close, they slowly close in on their play, flying to their tables. 

“Preparing for what, you make it sound like there is a war coming?”

“In some ways it is.  There was once talk of a land where alchemy was distilled and given up on.  Everyone felt that alchemy was a sham, a false ideology whereby foolish men wanted to turn base metals into profitable gold.  To my knowledge, that’s impossible.  Gold being “manufactured” as it is by these alchemists… Do you have any concept of supply and demand, Casey?  Gold is valuable because it is rare, not because of it’s composition or shininess.  Otherwise, pyrite would go for the same price.  This gigantic influx of gold, created form lead or some other common base metal… The value of gold would shrink, sink, and then finally die.  The only people that would gain financially would be the first group of alchemists that trade this “false gold” for goods ore services, or even better, the purchase of land.  After that initial development, the secret would get out, and no secret can be kept forever.  And then, the economy will shrink, sink, and die, aside from those initial alchemists who now own land and lease it out to others like feudal lords.”

The vendors.  The hawks ask them what price they are willing to sell their "wares" for.  They buyer quotes them a price, and the hawk tells him a much lower value.  The hawk knows this game very well, he knows how much cash it will take to purchase the items he desires before he even opens his mouth.  Soon enough, the deal is done, the "wares" being traded for green paper.  The place is nearly empty now, save for the vendors themselves, who most of which are in the process of packing up.

“I see.”

            Brad hustled over to the vendor who was selling sunglasses, dirt-cheap. Supposedly these are just regular run-of-the-mill sunglasses, but upon further inspection, and the use of common logic, a person would be led elsewhere.  Name-brand logos and phrases are embroidered on the cases and etched into the arms of the frames.  Are they mere knock-offs, or are they hot?  Another web of mystery and suspicion has been spun by the great Flea Market.  A curiosity that leads us to itself on weekends.

“There is no common man, then.  You must understand that.  There is no hero.  There is no ‘everyman’ that can be the unification of humankind’s simplification routine.  You must now go out and explain this, not to others, for they won’t understand, but to find the answer for yourself, the means to a common goal.”

Scott threw up as soon as he woke up that night in a cold sweat.  He couldn’t get the charred body out of his mind.  There was barely anything left…