HORSE
A man rode his horse slowly into the body of water. The sand beneath the horse’s hooves was wet and disappearing. I visited this place before, when it was just black birds and whistling pines. I tried to memorise the birdsong but my head would not let me. It was sad what happened to the birds and the people, especially the birds, they did not deserve it. The people did. The man on the horse tried to redirect the horse back onto land. He pulled on the reins, harsher than he was supposed to and the horse responded. The horse threw the man off his back into the body of water. The man sinks. His body holds water.

FISH
I have always always hated fish. Eating them I mean. I hated eating fish. There was something about the smell of plastic water that reeked all over their flesh and glossy skins. Even if you boiled them, fried them, seasoned them, put them in a grill, presented them fresh, smoked them, preserved them in sand, it never went away. It was like an irremovable stain much like the one I got from my birth. A reddish-brown star-shaped blood clot on the skin of my back, right down the middle where my spine lived. My mother wanted to give me away when she saw it because of how ugly it looked. It was a medium sized blob then. I heard she tried pressing it to flatten its shape or make it disappear but instead, transformed it into the shape of a wobbly star. I had never seen my mother’s back. But I knew she had been hiding her scars from me since the day I was born.

STAR
My father bought me a computer game for my twentieth birthday. He still saw me as the same person I was at nine, obsessed with doing the things he enjoyed doing. He taught me to play all the games I knew how to play. I had not played a single game in five years yet I tried this one. The name of the game was Pestilence. The aim was to build a world, any type of world with its own rules and moral codes. One got to choose the number of people, the types of animals, the number of genders, if and how many religions existed, births, deaths and how long the world would last. The program functioned based on decision making of each component of one’s world. A component was a creature capable of making sentient decisions. One could make an animal a component or remove the existence of work. One could bring forth numerous wars. All that was needed was the click of a button. I spent little time choosing what I wanted my world to look like. It was what I had always wanted. That the world should have more trees than people.And I put more whistling pines because I loved what they did with the wind. I made my world thirty percent water and seventy percent trees. I put some trees in the water too, just to make a point.
When I was done with the ecological parts, I started with the people. I made sure I was as random as I could. I put equal numbers of all races available and put all the moral codes to medium. I did not want people to mess with what I was creating. To win the game, I had to make sure my world succeeded within its allotted time of survival. If it did not due to any disruption or miscalculation in my planning, the whole thing fell apart. Despite the fact that I decided how long the world could survive, I could not determine what would happen within the allotted time. I let the combinations happen as they would. I checked online to see if anyone had completed it but there was none. I saw a YouTube video of a teenager talking about how he had played it to level 997 and was sure that he was going to win before 1000 because he cracked the correct combination of people. I realised I did not think much of the people but I did not care. I gave the game twenty minutes of play which equated to two million years of world time, the highest amount of allowable time to prevent the game from crashing. In five minutes, the game stopped. A red star popped up on the screen and with the words THE RULE WAS BROKEN displayed.
The most important part of the game was the people as I later learned. That even if I made an animal a component, it could only be responsible for so much. The decisions it made did not extend beyond its natural habitat. But humans could exert their influence anywhere. The only rule I gave the people in my world was to not destroy the trees. They could rest under their shade, feed from them, climb them but under no circumstance should a tree be uprooted. I put all the moral codes to the lowest, let them do everything else they wanted to do but they did not listen. They had to do that which I specifically pointed out as my only rule. I did not know how anyone could win the game. It was too unpredictable. I clicked on the red star and a black dot appeared with the word PUNISH. There was no other option so I clicked “Enter” on my keyboard. I watched as raging winds devoured every piece of being. Then I remembered the birds. They were the last to die. I knew them as the most innocent creatures of all that I brought to existence. I watched their black feathers shed and float across the horizon. I felt the weight of their last song. It was something I chose to keep.

HORSE
I used to have a recurring childhood dream. In the dream, I kept falling off my bed but I could not reach the end of my fall. I was suspended in the sensation of falling. Every background in the dream was made of my bedspread pattern—plastic looking sunflowers with pink petals instead of yellow. The first time I rode a pony, I fell on my face. I was seven years old. My father took me to a beach where they had horse riding as a feature. I thought it was cool, the way people looked regal on horses. I wanted to do it too, so I asked my father and he allowed me. There was a dress change where I had to put on a helmet and appropriate boots. Then I was assisted in climbing the pony. In a moment of daze, I became aware that I was not sitting on top of a lifeless thing but something that could breathe. I felt the horse’s skin like my own skin, its hair was mine, and its spine was like mine. I felt that I was sitting on its own birthmark even if I did not know whether it had one. I wanted to get down but I did not know how to tell them. A second ago, I was eager to get on. The horse riding instructor tried to put my hand on the reins. He kept trying to teach me how to sit but I was feeling very nervous. I felt like I was the horse, carrying the weight of someone on my back. When they left me for a moment to show them what I was taught, l let go of the reins and tried to get down myself. Instead, I fell on my face. The horse moved towards me after I fell and I stroked its face. I knew that the horse was concerned about me. My father was terrified. I had never seen him that way before. He hugged me and bought me a sweet drink to soften the pain. Later, when he asked if I wanted to try riding the horse again, I refused. Instead, I told him I wanted to take care of them.
I did not learn how to take care of horses but I eventually learnt how to ride them through a simulation game. It was a virtual reality programme that gave the experience of riding horses without really touching one. Sometimes my father and I would play the game while riding for miles in a desert not really saying anything but we were just there together in the computer generated sunset exploring the wide emptiness of the land. I always complained that the game was boring because nothing was at stake and he would tell me that it was more than a game. That it was about the oasis the game was named after. We never saw any oasis while roaming around in the desert but my father said it was there waiting, we had just not found it yet. Playing Pestilence reminded me a lot of that desert. I did not know if it was because it was the only other virtual reality game I played since then or because the sunset reminded me of all the beauty I tried to inculcate in every world I built. I wondered if the game was really about riding horses or if my father was right that there was a hidden water bank somewhere waiting to be discovered. I wanted to build a world where I did not hide things and no one needed to hide part of themselves. It was hard before I knew what the game wanted me to do. When I discovered it, I wished to live again.

FISH
My mother was a competitive swimmer. I spent my childhood watching some of her videos from her younger years when she was still active. She retired at the age of twenty six years old, four years before she met my father. There was something different about her then, she used to smile so brightly. I did not see her smile in that way in my twenty two years of life. She always told me that I would understand better when I got older why she had to stop swimming and why she was different from her past. Once I asked her to teach me to swim and her face turned into something I could not quite understand. It was horror, bitterness, sadness, and anger all rolled into one. I asked my father about it and he said I did not need to worry about swimming. That it was better that I learnt horse riding. I did not eventually learn to ride a real horse or swim. Anytime I passed by a body of water, I felt repulsed and drawn to it at the same time. It was like my body understood something about the water that I did not but my mind was still inquisitive about what it was. I knew something was hiding in my brain.

STAR
I did not remember much of my childhood apart from my strange dreams. I had only specific vivid memories of playing with horses with my dad, I did not have much about my mum. Only some images of her face in pain, or tired from what I did not know. My body felt weighty whenever I thought about it. Sometimes, I felt the star on my back throbbing. I imagined that it was a phantom ache left over from my mother’s pain. Whenever that happened, I lay down on my back and watched the ceiling, if I was indoors. Outside in a place where I felt comfortable lying down, I would lie on the grass and stare at the sky for a long time until I could not. Until I felt scared enough, lifeless enough like a thing that did not exist. When I broke away, my mind fell back like a heavy garb.

HORSE
I returned to Pestilence when I was twenty six years old and away from home. I tried to understand why a person would create a game with no breakthrough. I wondered if the aim was to make people watch the world burn many times over just like it was aptly named. I wanted my world to survive and I played for weeks on end but it was always the same. The human component never reached a perfect balance with the world they existed in. I tried my best to be easy, to work my way through every possible decision a person could make, yet, there was always something new, an oversight, a thought that was not meant to occur dragging the whole plan to dust. The worlds kept suffering, erupting into rubble. Apart from the trees which were a constant component, I took a liking to the horses, to reminisce on the times I spent with my dad. It was easy to get the game programmed so I could ride one in order to explore the world instead of just viewing through my VR goggles. The experience made me realise something—that I needed the horse for my world to survive. 

FISH
I began noticing gradually that the more I played, the more my memories swarmed back to me. When I was fifteen years old, my struggle with the absence of some of my memories was at its peak. I was taken to a psychiatrist who let me know that I suffered a major trauma in my childhood. What the trauma was, she could not tell me but part of my treatment was to make me forget what I knew. She said that I would be okay, that I should try to live more and gather joyful memories from the world. And that it would not matter when I built new memories. When I asked her if the trauma was related to water, she told me the discussion was over.

STAR
I once had a dream about glass caskets floating in the air. Inside the caskets were people, I could not tell if they were dead or dreaming, but there was some peace to the way they were lifted. More than I had ever seen on my parents while they slept. Yet, the peace felt familiar to me. I watched a movie titled “Devrhyenrhyenrheyn” meaning “Death and its Little Things” or “The Last Dance” depending on which translation code was used. The movie was all acted in LellingKôl, a dynamic collective language created to evade artificial intelligence understanding. It was a very volatile language which had the sole characteristic of rapid change. Meanings changed frequently but only those who spoke it knew when it did. It was a story about a man in a garden acting out a one-man play in front of his close friends and family. He wore a pink-coloured shirt and was surrounded by pink anemones and chrysanthemums. He spoke LellingKôl throughout while his audience remained silent. Their only expressions came in the form of laughter, gasps, incomprehensible sounds and cries. At the end of the play, the actor acting as ‘the man’ is stabbed in the middle of his abdomen with a sword, transecting his abdominal aorta and causing him to bleed out in front of everyone. They put his body in a transparent casket and elevated it on an invisible string into the clouds.

HORSE
A boy waded into the body of water. He tried to help the man whose body was already falling. The boy cried out for help and no one answered. I was not allowed to interfere, only to watch as every piece of the puzzle fit because every loss must count. But the horse went back, unafraid of the water, the horse stepped in and pulled the man by the neck of his shirt. The man’s shirt was stained with dark blood and his ears were filled with anemones. He coughed and the anemones split. His body was full of water, his mouth was dripping petals, and his eyes were shining mirrors. I waited for the world to end again like it always did. Every act of mercy had no meaning yet the world stood. The boy waited for the man to wake as I pre-empted their end. The horse lingered in her touch.
A boy waded out of the body of water. His skin was taut and his chest was devoid of motion. His mother carried him out. She put her ear to his chest, attempted to dissolve his ribs with air. He made no sound. This too was a memory I had about the world ending.

STAR
In our world, the real world, a man rode a hearse into the sky. In another, a man was lifted by his casket into the clouds. In the century before astronomers learnt to map the stars, they were believed to be pure elements of burning light representing the souls of every living being. They were the end result of an obliteration so great that a soul could return back to earth in a new form without remembering anything of their past lives. In perfect alignment, a star could fall on earth, transform into a thing with wings, and on land, adapt to four legs and a mane. This thing could die, decompose, and be washed down into rivers, streams and oceans picking back all its broken, dissipated pieces to form a thing that survived on water. That a person could drink that water and have lives added to their years. This too was a myth I told myself about the history of the world. The things we had to learn when we had no explanation for our purpose in the world than to dream. The things we said when we had to accept that we did not know.

FISH
I dreamt of tigers. Tigers with gills and multiple fins. They were suspended in clear water, swimming in slow motion and I was there in the water, surrounded by sunlight and the vast patterns of orange and black. It was a moment of peace in time, until the tigers started to realise that I was not one of them. I tried to run but I could not. The water pushed me downwards and I did not know how to swim. The dream transformed into a nightmare I had to wake up from. I played Pestilence over and over again. When the sky turned deep blue, I went back to sleep and I did not dream.

STAR
I knew I had a name but it did not matter what I was called. It mattered who called my name. I thought that a name was a wish, something like a prayer, which one gave to a thing to let them know they exist. But what hope was retained in a name never used, never called or adored. My mother would call me a different name from what my father called me. When I asked him about it, he said that I used to be called by his own name before I was born, but after my mother almost lost me, she renamed me. I was not told what the loss was. Only that it was definitely not my mother’s fault. Everything became a sky to me. My names. The worlds I existed in. The game I could never finish. The life I would never understand melting into my dreams. All my dreams felt like a living body entering into me when I went to sleep such that instead of granting relief from the world and its problems, a new world broke. Instead time was absent and there was enough possibility. And my body became an open thing.

HORSE
It entered through my back. A body trying to control me. It pulled on the edges of my mouth and threatened to swallow me. I fought back. I rejected control. I was a being that existed. I was a being bearing life even though it burnt through my skin. My eyes watered through every feeling reminding me that there was something living, pulsing within me even if I did not understand how to carry it. It was quite heavy like the body trying to control me. On most days, I did not feel the rope pulling me backwards into the unknown. On better days, I forgot that I was slowly trudging towards the unknown. On my best days, I could stare at the ocean of uncertainty and feel its warmth, the calmness reminding me that time was uncanny and unnecessary. That the world was a box, a stage or better still, a game with no winners and no losers, just little tiny lives trying to make a sound out of time.

FISH
Everything there was covered in film. Everything there was stained with light except the little bone from which light permeated. There was a strange body falling through the water, falling across my one good eye through which I saw the earth from all sides. The body

was falling through my eye or the image of it fell through and there was nothing I could do. I witnessed the little bone on the body forming, the last of a stack of little bones dividing the body into two. There was nothing about silence here, only motion. Nothing stopped the way I expected them to. Time wiggled across my skin, smoothened me into a drop. The body threatened to enter me. I did not refuse it.