Patterns on paper absorbing and reflecting light. Unreal images perceived as if they were true, tricking the mind, engaging the imagination in vicarious perception. The images lock into Ike’s brain, connecting with the human mind’s relentless need to parse, perceive, and resolve everything it sees. His hunger for understanding will overwhelm his senses and create a vision inside his thoughts. It is an ancient survival mechanism—a way to play out life and death without the consequences. He can imagine the possibilities, risk fee, and take his chances when he needs to.

Ike dips the brush into one of the bottles in front of him. The translucent liquid wicks up the bristles. He pulls it up, out, lets it drip, then presses it down onto the white board, and the bristles almost sigh as they spread apart.  Getting a little capillary action, he thinks to himself.

He leaves one long, curving swipe across the page, and then drops his head down onto the desk to view the pigment from a new perspective. The medium vaporizes—a chemical reaction that leaves a colored stain on the white cardboard the can never be undone. An irrevocable act that he’s committed a thousand times before.  Each time is harder than the last.

Ike tries to pull his head back up, but for a moment it is stuck to the table. He cannot fight it, overcome by intensity, trapped by gravity, and his own weakness. He is paralyzed only for a moment, and then his nervous system engages. The muscles in his neck and back twitch and contract, lifting him up above the page.

He sees the mark that he has left there, and tries to not let the mark become something, yet. Just let it be… abstract… a ribbon of magenta and nothing more.  He dips another brush—yellow. He pulls it across, leaving blood where it crosses over other line.

He shakes his head and he laughs at his little joke. It always starts out with blood, but rarely ends that way. He spatters on some cyan with a dirty brush and lets it expand. The vision is resolving against his will. He can see the future rushing up to meet him. Ike can smell it in the air, the tangy, almost musty, odor of the ink flowing with possibility.

Ike tips the bottle of black against his thumb, leaving a wet circle. He lets a single drop fall from his hand and explode across the board, then uses all his fingers to smear it as far as it will go. There is less abstraction in every moment. And against his better judgment—every damn time —he opens up the last bottle, cyan, and tips it onto the board. The sapphire tears roll downward, streaking through the other colors as it goes.

He sets the bottle down, and makes a futile gesture to clean his stained, shaking hands by rubbing them against a rough, dry cloth. But it doesn’t matter. The image is complete.

Ike just needs to open his eyes and he will see the future. It will leap off the page, and overtake his thoughts, wiping any other possibility. What it will be. And like all of the futures that he has ever seen, it will be unstoppable. Another death, another victory, another secret that he can, and will, exploit to make his life just that much better. But it isn’t about the payoff.

For Ike the future is just an itch that needs to be scratched.—a chemical dependency every bit as pathetic as any other addiction. In a second he will open the wild staring eyes of a junkie, satisfying the feeling of need, of release, of false power in an instant. And like any other drug, it will give Ike what he most desires, and then fade away. And he’ll chase it again and again, until the day that it reveals his own death, unstoppable, and inevitable.

The handles were squeezed tight around his arm, and the beige wedge of the bag stuck straight out from his back like a pathetic, featherless wing. It’s badly tarnished faux-brass buckles glinted dully in the blue-gray fluorescent mall lights.

Harry marched forward with a steady trot, his eyes pointed straight ahead, determined to avoid catching the gaze of any of his fellow shoppers, no matter how intensely they might be staring at him.

Something shifted inside the bag, and with a reflexive twitch, Harry squeezed his arm tight against his side. He grunted loudly as he did so, covering up a high-pitched squeal that emanated from the purse. “Settle down in there,” he said in a low grumble.

He had almost crossed the food court without incident when a pre-teen girl dressed in a pink fairy costume ran giggling and squealing across his path. He stopped short and stared at her. She opened her mouth to yell out hello, then went quiet when she saw the handbag, a look of puzzled curiosity in her eyes.

A second later she turned and ran back the way she came, ending up with her arms wrapped around her mother’s leg. The stocky blond woman was, thankfully, too engaged with her cellphone to pay any attention to a fat old man carrying a purse, no matter how urgently her daughter tugged at the sleeve of her blouse.

Even without her mother’s attention, the little girl continued to stare. He knew what she was feeling. “Gender confusion,” was how his granddaughter had referred to it the first she’d seen his curse. “That’s what college gets ya,” he’d told her. But he hadn’ forgotten the term.

The store labeled “Candle s ‘n Scents” in a somewhat tasteful scripted font marked the transition point from food court back to non-consumable items with an ironically strong scent of vanilla and cinnamon. Harry stomped past it, and went another 20 yards until he reached his destination: “Luggage and Things”.

On either side of the entryway suitcases had been bolted together with wire to form two towers that seemed to teeter with the weight of the signs promising great deals inside. Passing through them Harry had expected to see more variety inside, but once he passed through the portal all he saw was more luggage and a few backpacks that might, technically, qualify as “and Things.”

Winding his way through a jungle of unwieldy merchandise, Harry reached the high counter. Sitting behind it, oblivious to his lone customer, was an obviously bored young man, with a moussed-up haircut that gave Harry some “gender confusion” of his own.

“What’s the strongest bag ya got?” Harry asked him.

The clerk jumped slightly and looked up from the screen of the smart phone in his hand, peering a him through his unnecessarily thick black frames. “What?”

Harry scowled and spoke more slowly, “Your… strongest… bag… What… is… it?

The clerk gave him a frown in return for his sarcasm. “Well, we have bags that are reinforced in a variety of ways. What did you need it for?”

“Jeez Louise.” Harry rolled his eyes. “If I knew I was gonna get interrogated I woulda bought one offa the Internet.” He paused a moment, then tried again with a bit more enthusiasm, “Maybe one a them gorilla-proof bags, like in the commercials.”

“You mean a Samsonite?” The clerk replied. He pointed over to a badly faded cardboard cutout of a gorilla standing a suitcase. It had been firmly glued to the wall, and a few letters of the word Samsonite had survived the test of time, but not many.

Harry checked out the image and nodded in recognition. “Yeah, okay.”

“We don’t carry Samsonite anymore.”

Harry threw up his arms,” I couldn’t give a ding dong damn who makes it. Just so it’s tough.”

The clerk stood up, finally convinced that Harry was a serious enough customer that he would need to come down from his perch. “Do you want wheels?”

“I’ll take ‘em if you got ‘em.”

15 minutes later Harry stepped out of the mall, his new purchase rolling noisily behind him—a medium sized piece of black, hard-shelled luggage. It was fairly stylish, if nondescript. Being dragged across the mall parking lot on a snowy winter night it seemed only slightly less out of place than the purse had, but at least Harry was no longer wearing the handbag.

After every few steps the luggage would suddenly jump, followed by an unintelligible stream of muffled, angry, gibberish that sounded a great deal like swearing.

By the time Harry reached the car the bag was careening wildly with every step. Harry had become exhausted with the struggle. Placing his hand on the hard surface to contain it he leaned down and spoke to it quietly, but sternly, “Chill the eff out or I’ll chuck you in the river.”

A high-pitched voice rose up from inside. “I’ll always come back.”

Harry’s voice went up an octave as he tried to plead with it, “Can’t you, you know, just stay in there and shut up?”

There was a moment of silence and after a few seconds Harry took his hand away and stepped back. The squeaky voice somehow managed to sound very serious, “You know what you did.”

Harry opened the trunk, and then picked up his new piece of luggage and flung it in, letting it land with a dead-cat bounce. He regretted it almost instantly when he saw that the brand new locks were already beginning to break loose. They wouldn’t last long. Maybe he could use some duct tape when he got home, or maybe he’d be wearing the handbag again tomorrow.

He slammed the trunk shut and rolled himself into the car with a loud old-man groan. He could already hear the trapped creature rattling the luggage around in the trunk behind him.

Harry held up the empty ring finger of his left hand and scratched it gently with his thumb, “Yeah, I guess I do know.”