Dear Maxwell… She had old batteries in her flashlight. It kept dimming, as she shook it to test it. It flickered five times. This was her perfect fifth, and would be the only perfect fifth in her spooky story. The remaining movements composed within would be perfect too, yet they were destined to be perfect fourths from the heart. The first movement would be the maximum interval, the sounding lift from one to the singing fifth of the vocal cord butterfly. Thereafter, perfect fourths would guide shift within the spooky sky, from past to present then future to past circling time. Her ear rang as she looked up into the sky through a skylight above, in the roof of train car seven. She thought about the girls from the river. She thought about the claims made on land that would never really be owned. She thought about how those claims on land, somehow justified a civilization to lay claims upon women in an unjustified way. She then realized that it was the same entitlement that made those men think they could own nature, that resulted in terrorism in the present day. She looked down at her list, shining her light upon it. Specific characters in her story comprised the list. She wondered if they would realize the names were just slightly changed. She figured they must be smart enough to know she was writing about them… whatever. She gave them too much credit. She had made her list, and edited it as the story unfolded, characters disappearing as they dare infringe upon her happiness. After all, every good story has to have a happy ending.

The train car casino was roaring with laughter. The tower continued to grow tall and stout by the hands of all. All were in the game, gamers now having become of the previous religious leaders, touting doctrine… now that train car seven had transformed into a casino. The diplomats too, became full fledged gamers, as enthusiasm amplified with each face card laid up on the table, reflecting their faces. The poker game continued. The kingdom expanded horizontally as the tower in center grew vertically. The queen exited the car, as her taste for red wine was exhausted. The princess was the only female remaining in the casino car, aside from the invisible girl and her flashlight. The manly poker table surround around the square table, all gamers projecting, fondled the tower as they stacked cards on edge higher. The gaming was a hybrid event; one of poker playing and also of kingdom building. The gamers projected their inner most desires into the card stacking game playing. In the middle of the card table, the one towering tower meant everything to them. It was the center of point, defining the kingdom’s masculine oneness. As train car number seven turned from a bustling bar hopping to a game playing casino, the kingdom’s future economy began to form.

‘I love casinos!’ the joker proclaimed. They rolled out the bills, and busted out the chips. ‘Ante up!’ the sergeant barked. ‘It’s time for a high stakes game’. The stakes became high as the tower stacked tall. Their highness grew as they each threw in a chip as the gaming became physical. The miller kept whittling away at the tower, stacking and rearranging cards from the floor. ‘Look at this pole I just made in the middle of the tower,’ he pointed out with his pinky as the others studied their full hands. ‘It’s big, right?’ The others only paid half attention to him, laughing a bit, having dealt with his compensatory antics for some time already. The cush laughed at him the hardest, ‘What are you talking about… my daddy helped build the biggest tower of all and it’s not made of cards!’ The stakes became higher and higher as the competition became uncontained in the casino.

The princess sat in the background, quietly observing. She preserved her position as the only remaining royalty by not engaging in the gaming. She figured he was above it all. She gazed at the tower in adornment, as the gamers compared their contributions to its vertical projection. Each wanted pride of ownership in its making, as the casino loudened with competitive comparison of towering prowess. ‘My tower’s the biggest!’ exclaimed the joker. ‘I’m the biggest most powerful towering god of all!’. ‘No way!’ barked the sergeant. ‘My tower reaches the clouds of heaven, where everyone’s lives go to be pixilated with perfection… I am god beyond all physical limitations!’. The miller all the while, continued to play with his card stacking hoping it rolling and polling of the cards would eventually compare to their real life towers. He began to shrink in his chair upon realization that his tower was neither real or virtual, that it was just a stack of cards rendering it temporary and therefore meaningless in many ways. But he was determined to compete at the poker table. ‘I have a tower too…’ he said in a simpy kind of way. Then the cush glanced over at the princess, ‘Hey baby, what you think of my tower?’. She smiled and looked down pretending to be shy, then shifted over to the poker table and sat back on the cush’s lap.

As they fought over the tower on center, each claiming ownership of the feat. As the men around the table competed, the princess began stacking cards into casinos around the tower. Casinos within the kingdom upon the table grew. The gamers joined her. ‘This is cool!’ exclaimed the sucker. ‘We can convince people these bits of coins have value and take their money in exchange for them… so they think they’re powerful gamers like us.’ ‘Genius, man… genius,’ responded the sergeant. ‘I’ll coordinate the sales to all the electronic addresses.’ ‘They’ll get to confused about reality, money and everything they’ll give away everything they have to our imaginary aether coins!’ ‘Fucking genius,’ proclaimed the cush. ‘Then we can reinvest it in more card kingdom casino building with plenty ‘o laundry rooms!’ As they planned the demise of the subjects of the kingdom, a lone traveler entered casino car seven, drawn to the towering vision of cards. ‘Hey guys, I wish I had tower like that one.’

In the blurry banks of the river below, butterflies sat in witness. From below the ground floor of the train, they witnessed footsteps of the passengers threading through the train cars stitching across the vestibules in non-sequential order. The butterflies watched the prints as they imprinted memory as recorded frequencies. They watched the traveler having recently engaged with the gamers. He paced anxiously in the casino, having a hard time standing still, enviously entranced with the poke her tower. Then the traveler turned his pacing into trancing, exiting the casino car seven to car six and then traveling further back toward the caboose through the traffic. He shifted through the foot stepping traffic like a pro. As he did, his traveling turned into trafficking. He ventured toward train car two as the butterflies watched his footsteps from below, imprinting anxiously across the train floor.

The girl followed him with her flash light. He reeked of perversive disease so she was careful not to get to close. Other passengers sensed this too, and cleared the way for his foot steps so as to not touch his disease. This made his trafficking disturbingly seamless as people whited out of his path of travel. He walked trafficking to train car two, where the children slept. Girls on stage left the train car, he focused his attention on the young ones. He assessed his prey privately and invisibly in his mind matching each girl sleeping with one of each in train car seven. A major sixth, from car two he would lure the girls through the train traffic to royal car seven. He told them they could be princesses. He told them everything would be okay. Opportunity was all he considered while standing, stalking, and strategizing splitting in train car two, as the eight car train sat still on the bridge.

The vibrations having stopped, the children were in and out of sleep state. The trafficker touched and tickled the girls to wake them. He offered them special drinks, claiming to help them feel better and brighter after lax of sleep on the bridge. The girls thinking they were safe in the train, spanning high above the river below, trusted the seasoned traveler. He walked through the car, all they way to the caboose to toss a couple loads of laundry in the dryers. Then upon returning to the children’s car he invited the girls to the casino. He said they were going to play some games. He said there were many men in the casino with a tower. He said they were playing poke her. Upon his return to train car seven, girls following in a line, the priest passed them walking to the back too… to train car three where the boys on the field trip resided.

The trafficker focused the tall poker tower. The casino abuzz upon return, he ushered the girls to sit upon the gamers laps so they could gaze upon the tall tower too. The princess still held pole position sitting on the cushion upon the throne, sensing her royal posit was close at hand. She realized what was happening and in keeping with her role, smiled statically as she waved with her one free hand. The girl all the while witnessed from her invisible stance in the casino train car, her invisibility sustained by her flash light point projecting generating only a glow of her presence to those looking from the outside in. She watched the gamers fight over the tall poker tower as they laid their hands wherever they pleased on the girls sitting upon their laps. The trafficker snatched extra chips from each gamer for his contribution the kingdom. As the economy of the real time casino in train car seven evolved they all began to discuss the economic opportunity within the casinos calibrated with cards stacked within the kingdom surround, upon the square table.

Of all the players around the table, who was now in fact a gamer or royalty, or a religious leader was becoming a blur. XXXX As the gamers had their fun, the traveling trafficked through the train seeking new virgins for the taking. He walked to the far back to check on his laundry. Through car number two again he ticked some of the girls and invited them up to car seven, interrupting their alpha wave dream states. Upon shifting back up to the front he tried to expedite his walk through train car five after seeing a girl with headphones sitting alone, playing chess. The girl with the flashlight was embodied in a past dimension, and when he walked into car five he could sense the shift in time backwards. As he passed her seat he heard her whisper, ‘It doesn’t matter if you plead the fifth, the truth already exists.’ Shaken, he stepped up his gate through car six past the elderly couple with the baby boy, back into car seven feeling the shift into the present once again. Amongst the poker players he felt at home in a casino. The casinos around the kingdom now had laundry rooms of their own and girls inhabiting the gaming rooms threatened into encouraging economic transactions of all kinds, including but not limited to those involving their own bodies.

‘You should have pleaded the perfect fourth instead. The truth is out there. When you disappear, it will be revealed.’ The whisper made him shutter as he watched the kingdom of cards grow across the table now embossed with a chess board pattern. He focused on the gaming and laughing instead of the chess match embossed under the stacking cards. He thought of his little island and the letter written by its namesake, always appearing ninth in the order of disciples. He heard then another whisper, ‘I’ve written my own letter from the sky high up above the island, in the airstream.’ The traveler shuttered again as he was a traitor, and now understood this would be revealed. He was aware his time had come. So he walked past the gamers into train car eight, never to be seen again.

She played chess in train car five, as they played poker in seven. As the sun set and moon rose high she took out her real flash light to see the board clearly. She studied the pawns carefully, in orientation relative to the royalty placed in specific locations across the checked board. She imagined the kingdom of cards strewn across the table in the casino car. She thought about all the diseased gamers who invaded the girls, brokered by the traffickers and how the names of such were on a list to be revealed in unpredicted time. Then she thought about violence. She could hear the river below flowing under the bridge. She thought about the girls from the river once again. She could sense the butterflies in waiting along the banks. She had written a letter, long before the traveler was exposed. She had written a letter to Maxwell in the story Dear Maxwell:

~

...Myself and others like me have made our point, stated our case time and time again... diverted lies with exhaustion. We are exhausted, indeed. We did our best to help those who did in fact form the world realize that it was in everyone’s interest to listen to us…

~

She gazed out the train window panorama at the full moon, as she thought she heard a plane fly above. Then she looked up and wondered if she saw plane lights or if the clouds were moving past a field of stars. She studied the dark sky in depth recognizing the orientation of the other stars within its infinite labyrinth. Hazes of clouds moved past the lights in seemingly random patterns and ways. Still the stars seemed to have meaning in their organization. She looked down at the pawns again upon and within her chess board, and moved one into the wake of the horse. The white king was close to the center of the chess board, as if it considered itself invincible. The queen was hiding in the corner, as she was also doing in real time within the casino car seven. She heard the casino car roar again with laughter as the joker spouted, ‘Wish we were all on board baby!’. The girl smiled as she understood he meant on-board the plane above, while she pictured them upon her chess board.

All the poker players then laughed in unison. ‘Hey girls, ya wanna ride the plane, haha!’ the miller shouted as his cohorts looked at him a little cross eyed. The searg smiled, ‘You see all those clouds? I own the clouds, even higher in the sky than the tower. Just google it.’ The cush laughed, ‘Hey, get blondie the joker in office then I’ll have some leverage with my real estate… I can use military leverage to finance my properties. There’s nothing immaculately illegal about that!’. Comparisons between masculinity and the tall poker tower on the table, manly metaphors became increasingly obvious. The clouds weren’t moving… it was a plane after all. Upon the plane the girls from train car number two resided, no where to escape in the spooky sky.

Upon her list, the poker players were highlighted. In the darkness she could count them like she could count her toes, standing on the last plank at the edge of the dock… along the blurry banks of the river. She counted the characters in her script. She wondered if her story should be a script; if it should be intended as a healing medicinal in some way for some thing which she didn’t even realize existed at the present time. If it did become a script it certainly couldn’t be prescriptive. It would have to move through time void of premeditation, in a non-linear effect with affection. Ten toes minus two, one for each step, as she studied her list composed of eight in the dark with her flashlight. She was the invisible character in her story, so she didn’t count herself. She was a protagonist. She was one of another in her paradigm. Perhaps this was the reason her story should be a script. She could hear the girls from the river below lost in the airstream above. They visited her now and again, in the spooky sky.

She found herself alone, in the dark sky. And alone was okay. Maybe it was even the better. Authoring a script so close to a documentary made her feel even more hopeless than the experiences that turned her into the invisible. She’d realized hope was a human thing, and was glad to no longer be human. She’d become something fluxing between tangible and invisible. The physical world had separated her from her body, so many times. Her ability re-enter herself had weakened, leaving her detached from her bones and flesh almost always. To amend that would take lifetimes. So she was prepared to live this one out as a ghost. So she fluxed and flexed and interconnected between the verses of many worlds, in time.

Often at night, she could hear the swoosh of others like her, and wondered what happened to them. She could hear cries, contemplations, footsteps running through the airstream within the spooky sky. She loved these others like a child loves a mother’s embodiment. She loved them like sisters sometimes, like daughters at others. When they cried, she cried too. She felt warm when she heard a giggle; cold like ice when listening to stories of events that turned them into ghosts in the first place. They had been detached from their bodies as had she, when other humans stole them… trafficked them. They were always searching for a home. Her friends floating in the airstream, often high in the sky, took away her aloneness when she felt their presence. They existed inside the airstream of the spooky sky, but were ghosts from the river once streaming within the telluric earth.