FRANK
A Narrative Of Spiritual Awakening And Purpose By: Peter M. Karns
















CHAPTER 1: FRIDAY

Frank was outside today. He wasn't outside very often because in this state it seemed to be bright all the time and he didn't like the sun. He'd never really liked it. Projecting shadows on the buildings, generating giant sundials. That's all he saw, anyway. His sense of time was based, instead, on the grey days, the days in between. He felt he had more in common with the sky when there was no sun, no blue, and no stars. Just complete, empty, unchanging grey. He would look up for as long as his neck could support his head and admire the grey, with the black, dead fingers of the treetops reaching out into it.
Frank walked down the shiny, black streets and noticed the bits of decomposing litter in the gutters, sidewalks, and blown up against chain-link fences. Bright, multi-colored tree pulp pressed into cylindri-conal objects, now stomped flat and discarded to be stepped on, blown, and run over, eventually mixing with the dead leaves and others like itself, until finally biodegrading to the size of which can be digested by a lone, roaming worm. He thought of the worms and how their lives must be the most gratifying of any other organism of any other planet in creation. They were the arbitrators. They returned anything and everything to perfect zero. Blindly consuming all and expelling it into the matter which everything is made of. Biological supernovas making stardust shit.
Every time Frank went outside he saw every reason he'd ever had for only liking grey skies. Liquor stores with rust tinted windows, the only people coming out were the homeless with their alms-bought whiskey, gin, and vodka, grinning their three-toothed grins of inebriation. The prostitutes who had done so many feats with so many dicks that all they saw in the men walking by on the street were their imagined sizes and how these men would use it depending on what they were wearing while they passed. The men in the black suits and white collars on the street corners, atop milk crates screaming with red cheeks and vericose throats that all any of us had to do was let a bearded, executed white man into our hearts and we'd save ourselves from catching on fire forever after we died. As if anyone was on fire in life. Like anyone knew what a fire inside would have felt like. The best the world had to offer walked the streets every day and Frank knew that he had everything in common with them. He was dejected like all of them. He was the prodigal son in the broken home of the world. He knew fear.
Frank was almost at the end of the block. The corner of Almost Street and Never Avenue. There was a bench there and he decided to sit down. He had nothing else to do today. It was Friday and the grey signified the end. The bench had the face of a defense attorney with a serious look on his face and a phone number. It said in big bold letters, "If you have been in an accident recently, you need someone to help you. Let that someone be Greenwald and Oberlindt". Frank thought about this for a moment while he was sitting. Franks life was an accident, his mother being drunk at a party at the moment of conception. The condom was too old to have been effective. He wondered how Greenwald and Oberlindt would help him. Nothing short of a time machine and a Plan B Pill could help him. Or perhaps a wire hanger. He doubted they had these things, or would know how to use them. They wouldn't have had to put an add on the backrest of a Metro Transit bench if they did. Frank sat and watched the buses pass. He had no money and even if he did there was nowhere consequential for him to be. The world had the same layer of grease and dried blood no matter where you went. Here was as good as anywhere.
Frank thought about this morning. He'd woken with one of the mattress springs sticking into his side. He'd wondered if he should get a tetanus shot from the rust on the spring, but he figured it would be a waste of the needle, medicine, and tourniquet. Even the latex gloves. Besides, it's not as though he could have paid for it. And his unemployment signified his eminence in society. If he wasn't employed at a job that payed him enough to afford health insurance, then he wasn't entitled to good health. That was something safeguarded for the more upstanding.
Frank had attempted to shave, but only managed to make the beard on his face look more mangy and uneven. The lack of water in his tenement block of concrete coffin made it difficult to do simple things like this. He'd moved the thick wool blanket from the window enough to see the deep grey of the sky this morning and had the enthusiasm to revisit the streets. It was nearly noon, but he didn't know this. He didn't know the day, the time, only vaguely the year, and cared about none of them. All there was to him was the light and the dark. He liked the dark, but preferred the grey. He hadn't completely given himself to embracing the depths of hatred and malice. He was a nihilist, a cynic, a pessimist, and a manic-depressive, but he was still indifferent to the human multitudes that surrounded him. He viewed them as the same species of ghost as himself and was just as blasé towards them as they were to him. Aimlessly floating about the planet until the uncertain end. Presently something came to Frank's attention.
While Frank had been musing over his morning (though there was no way of knowing whether it was truly morning or not), someone had sat next to him on the bench. Frank wondered if this person had noticed that he was there, for he had only just realized them, though they had been sitting there for some while, as it seemed to him. He wondered if he had sat down without noticing them. As he looked at this human, they looked back at him. It was a man, about the age of 26, with deep and very dark (almost purplish) tissue surrounding his eyes. His face was unshaven, though not as much as Frank's. He was wearing a large military issued jacket that was a deeper green than intended, now being wet with the drizzle of the day. His eyes were blue, though terribly bloodshot, as if sleep was a dream of reality. A hand-rolled cigarette was wedged between two large, tobacco-stained fingers, the ash longer than the smokable remainder. His hair was a tangle of brown, greasy locks. There were bits of the trash that littered the streets stuck in it. The same worm-food as this man.
Frank noticed that the man was staring at him, though he couldn't know how long he had been doing so.

"Hey man, got a light?", the man said without warning.
"No", Frank replied, though the fact that the man's cigarette was already lit made Frank wonder as to the validity of the question.
"What about a dollar? I'm trying to catch the bus. Gotta go to my son's baseball game"
"No, I've got no money"
Frank didn't like this type of conversation, if any. Scum of the streets validating their lack of income with lies of sons and daughters. As if offspring gave them some kind of financial entitlement.
"Come on man, just a dollar."
"I told you. I don't have anything."
"Come on, don't let my son down"
"Look, just leave me alone, I don't have any money."

At this the man stood came towards Frank in a burst. Frank fell to the ground, stunned and a bit dazed, not having expected this outburst. He felt a throb in his neck as though something had hit him sharply. He found that everything was slow-moving and hazy through his eyes. His limbs didn't seem to follow the orders of his brain. Something opaque was in his right eye, though it didn't sting. The throbbing in his throat was growing deeper, though it didn't hurt. It seemed to be pounding his skull with it's force. With his left eye, Frank saw the man digging through his pockets. The man's eyes were bulging in anticipation, and when his search yielded nothing he disappeared as if he were an apparition. Frank moved his hand to his throat, though his fingers had lost their feeling. When he moved them in front of his face he saw red droplets falling onto his face and dripping, in little imperfect lines, down his arm. It made sense to him though he didn't really care. If this was truly the end then there didn't seem to be anything he could really do about it. Friday. The end of his life. He didn't know it was Friday, but it would have been just as good as any other day for his death, in his mind.
He stared into the grey sky and liked the emptiness. The face of a prostitute came into his line of vision. She was saying something to him, but he couldn't hear her. Just those big, plump lips moving up and down over the white, sparkly teeth. He saw that weary look in her eye that all of the sisters in her line of employment carried after day 1 of work. Frank saw one of her eyebrows raise unconsciously. He wondered what her analysis of his dick-size was, given all the blood he was wearing at present. His eyes closed and his heart ceased to beat. The inertia of blood-flow from his cardiovascular system allowed his brain 3 seconds of functionality before shutting off. Nothing came to Frank's mind in those 3 seconds. His death was the logical conclusion of his life, as can be said of us all.

CHAPTER 2: JUDGEMENT AND THE ROAD

Frank was surprised by the fact that he could open his eyes at all when he did. And when he did the sight that greeted his eyes reminded him that he wasn't really opening his eyes. He was reminded that he was no longer alive and that the idea of eyes was connected to a pulse and no longer applied here. He was in front of a large black pulpit, seemingly suspended in the darkness of space, save for one small, dim star directly above the preacher's implement, the fires inside it barely convecting in it's confines. It only lighted the shine of what seemed to be ebony polish on the pulpit, and the grey skin of a large man behind it. He looked old, tired, and loathsome. He wore a shabby old suit with a ripped shoulder and looked moth-eaten and dusty. His white hair fell out in greasy locks beneath a top-hat with the top missing. The only thing special about this man was his eyes. They burned with the same dull, painful light as the star below which he sat, or stood. Frank couldn't tell which. Presently the man read from a file on a clip-board that he had produced from somewhere inside the pulpit in a deep, monotone voice.
"Frank -"
Frank interrupted him, saying,
"I've heard the stories about this part. Just skip to the end. There's nothing worth seeing or talking about."
"Then go", said the grey-skinned man.
The clip-board in the man's hand turned to ash and disintegrated into nothingness and the front of the pulpit opened, showing a road behind it that lead until the mists outlining the frontier behind it swallowed it an entire ten feet inside. Frank stepped in and began walking. That was all he could do.
The stones on which Frank walked were black and slick, as though they were formed inside some distant volcano and chipped into bricks to be laid here. On either side of this road there was yellow, dead grass that gently shuddered from the soft, chill breeze that swept over unseen hills. The mist surrounding him was deep and grey. He liked this place. Grey and alone. He didn't know why he kept walking, as he would be content to stay in this place and just sit for eternity, not being bothered with whatever torments he was sure he was probably walking to. In truth, the inability to stop walking, though this place suited him, was already torment enough.
Frank thought back on the life he'd lived. He remembered the last week before his murder. Every day he would look out the window and shrink back after seeing the effulgence. He had altered the tenement in which he had lived in such a way that it was utterly dark , save a few black-light lamps. He liked the way it made his skin glow. He had put layers of callouses on his hands pounding nails into the concrete walls to hang his strata of blankets. Now and then a hole would have to be patched, but other than the sunlight of his youth and the daily sky analysis he saw, felt, or otherwise experienced no sunlight. In his last week Frank had wearied of his collections and had started engraving words into the concrete with a nail. He didn't know whether or not he was doing it for himself or for some other person who might come into this place long after he left it, but he felt the need to do it. The first one he'd done was a quote he'd read somewhere. He didn't remember where exactly, but he'd remembered the words.
"Decay is just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."
It had taken him all day and when he was done he had looked at it and read it over and over. He looked at his hands with the concrete dust and the skin peeling from the callouses and knew that he was decaying, but he didn't feel beautiful. He had tried to think of the last beautiful thing he could remember, but all that had come to him was grey. Before that and after that there was nothing but the displays of inhumanity by everyone surrounding him. From birth to death it was nothing but one big dance of violence and and self-immolation...
Frank had been walking down the black road for some time when out of the mists he saw the shadow. As he reached it, the shadow evolved into a man. The man stood about 6 feet in height and was emaciated, like a stray dog, rib bones visible with deep shadows in between each. Frank counted. He had spare ribs. He was older, but not elderly and had a short, peppered beard. The wrinkles on his face were in all the places of sadness and scowls. His eyes were completely white, having no iris or pupil. Just blank, terrible whiteness. He wore only a pair of overalls that were caked with soot and dirt. His fingertips were completely black, not with oil or something that could wash, but rather with the grit of an ironworker, eternally stained by his trade. The bits engrained in his flesh, now more a part of him than whatever possessions he'd left behind on Earth, bought with the destruction of his soul. He hobbled down the road like a Hell-bound stranger. And he was. Frank's faster pace forced him to go around the man and as he went to pass the man said,
"Where does this road lead? The star man told me to walk, but didn't tell me where I was going."
"I don't know", Frank replied. He didn't. He had a dim idea but didn't want to say it out loud, lest it be the truth.

Frank passed the man without any further conversation. The man's eyes made Frank uneasy. Too white. His fingertips too black. No balance and no lines. Just the fading carcass of a soul that should have dissipated into nothingness after his meaningless death. This, at least, he shared with Frank. Frank's bare feet pattered wetly on the volcanic cobble-glass. He noticed that the further he went down this road, the darker the dead grass became. The darker the nutrient-less soil underneath it. Not so much darker in color by some organic process, or even by lack of life, but by a thin, rapidly increasing layer of what looked to be tar, but was much thinner in viscosity. Frank looked at his hands and noticed the same substance that coated the grass was in small, pellet-like dots on his skin. It was raining, but the rain in this place had no smell. He could hardly feel it landing on him. It was the same temperature as his soul. And this soul was slowly being painted black so as to be ready for the place it was going.
Frank continued walking down the road, noticing that the black rain was growing thicker. He could feel himself being coated in it. By the time he had walked another mile (by earthly terms), it was pouring down so heavily that he could scarcely see in front of his own face. Also the further he went the hotter the rain got. It was beginning to irritate his skin. All he was able to do was to look down at the road, unable to look up lest he be blinded. The road was now only distinguishable from the hills by the faint outline of the volcanic glass bricks. All was black now and the blackness seemed to envelope everything. He kept walking, putting a shoulder to the scalding black downpour. He walked and walked until it became almost unbearable. The heat was penetrating into the backs of his eyes, burning everything. He put his hands over his face to try and quell the pain, but his hands were just as soaked and scorching.
Frank stepped heavily and felt nothing. He heard the boiling tar striking the glass bricks, but he didn't feel it beating his body. In fact his body felt as though it were cooling. Like a hand just dipped in liquid wax, the pain was still there but was easing now that the source was seemingly gone. Frank lifted his gaze from the stones and saw that he was standing in a rainless, mistless column. He could see for miles to his left and right. The scenery continued on forever as it had been in the ten feet of his sight at the beginning of his pilgrimage. Yellow grass topping low, sad, grey-soiled hills. Directly in front of him Frank saw a door, though to truly call it a door you'd have to be a titan. It was moreso a sheer wall that had been erected from black iron. It rose hundreds of yards in front of him and came to crest in jagged, rough arches. The wall went on in either direction as far as Frank could see. The road that he'd been walking lead directly into it, though Frank could see a faint crack that seemed to go up. As he approached it he made out a red button on the face of the door with a rudimentary little sign scribed in all-capital characters reading, "Abandon all hope ye who press here".
Frank looked around for a moment, not really knowing if he wanted to press the doorbell of Hell or not. It seemed to be a rather asinine design, being that if one wanted, he could simply turn around and walk away, never having to abandon all of his hope. Frank decided, however, that he would press it and find out what happened. He was curious what Hell really looked like. He had always wondered if the Christians had gotten it right. Besides, he didn't have much hope to abandon anyway. He took a deep breath and pushed the button.
CHAPTER 3: HEAVEN AND HELL: A BRIEF HISTORY
When the universe was created by God, He had no idea what was to become of it. He hadn't made it with any intentions, but rather, out of a vague interest in invention, and for the most part served to maintain it in the same way a small boy maintains a fish bowl - Reluctantly and only because of a false sense of duty. He contrived humans with the ability to procreate with the idea of keeping Himself from the inconvenience of having to custom-build each individual. He made the planet self sufficient so people had the food, water, light, and everything else they required to survive.
Next He made the angels. He thought of the angels as the beta version of mankind, making them superior and more competent. He even made a system that when humans died, they would be upgraded to the status of angel. That functioned well until some of the angels became jealous of the seemingly endless amount of knowledge and creativity that God had. They'd attempted to fashion their own humans in the past but hadn't met with any success. They had tried to collaborate in making their own planets and small solar systems, only to be disappeared for trying to reproduce the work of God. The only one that came close was Satan. He had his solar system up and running, everything flourishing, until God was informed of it.
God, in all his vast and mysterious ways had many of the same characteristics as the humans that he'd made, including loneliness. He'd wished for a friend, someone that would be nearly equal to Him. This is how he'd made the Morningstar, without any of the angels, or even Lucifer Himself knowing. Not until the creation of the dark solar system by Satan was this a problem. When God learned of it, he destroyed the entire constellation immediately, and being unable to destroy Satan along with it (having made Him too powerful), he decided upon a banishment. He constructed a country for Satan, known as Hell, and sent Him and all the other angels that had witnessed the creation of the black star system and partaken in it's making. Satan, never having the taste for serving under an equal saw this as an opportunity to submerge himself in His own ordeals.
He distracted Himself with teaching the angels banished about His ideas about the hierarchy of Heaven and how it should be run. This created some unrest in Heaven. God, knowing that Satan was his equal, began thinking of ways that he could subdue hell's citizens. After a short era, God began sending the human spirits He didn't approve of to Hell for Satan to deal with. He didn't want any more responsibility than He had to have, so he wordlessly sent them to someone equally empowered. Satan, not knowing what to do with them at first, would torture and rape them, feeling it the justified thing to do with them in punishment the things they'd done during their lives. But eventually He came to the realization that doing these things made Him, in Hell, no better than these humans were on Earth. He had no desire to force the attrition of a God that he didn't worship. He instead began teaching them as they came into His city. He showed them the delusions of their past ways and introduced them to a higher level of understanding.
Before long many of the new citizens of Hell began to question why they were banished and now that they had forgiven themselves, and had therefore been forgiven of all, they saw no reason why they should be exiled as well as their king. When pressed on this point, Lucifer agreed and decided to lead a pilgrimage back to Heaven, to show God they could be together again, and that the brothers of angels and humans didn't need to be shattered any longer.
When at the gates of Heaven, they were greeted with oaths and golden stones being thrown at them. In the absence of the exiled God had taught the remaining angels and the new breed that the banished were a lesser race, that they were ejected because of their inequality, and that they were hardly angelic and didn't deserve to be treated as such. The Host of Heaven labeled them “Demon”, which became the derogatory name embraced by the rest as the reason to ostracize them and lead campaigns against them.
At the height of the wars between Heaven and Hell, God decided to send an ambassador to Earth to convince people to accept God and Himself as their saviors and to join them in the conquest of the demons, thus enlarging their army beyond the confines of the outer-firmament. This ambassador was called Jesus Christ, the son of God. After His death on Earth, Jesus went back to Heaven to take up arms against the demons again, leading armies of angels to the gates of Hell, capturing demons and bringing them back to Heaven to work as slaves, and in some new cases, to be killed and cannibalized. This was the way of things. Heaven had to maintain a constant state of war with Hell to preserve the false conviction that the demons were a lesser race. The wartime propaganda succeeded in keeping the angels of Heaven with fear and hatred coursing through them.
After several successful campaigns against demonkind, Jesus decided that He wanted to succeed the throne of Heaven. With a large army, he overthrew God, and banished Him to an unknown place, taking Heaven by force. After this coup, the transformation of Heaven began.
Propaganda began being manufactured in more and more frequency, with more and more radical depictions of the demons. The defamation of the angels of Hell was complete, and soon there came business out of going to the Heaven/Hell parameter and killing demons to bring back as food. Soon this practice was so in demand that it was used as a form of currency. This, not being of enough worth, was soon replaced by bills woven from the hair of severed demon heads. There were teams of Hunters who would kidnap people to kill and make into money, literally. These teams were called Orions.
Soon, the racism grew to the point that the killings were a public phenomenon, being done in an arena setting. The amount of violence was soon so high that there were cases of mental breakdowns and dementia in entire communities.
Thus the drug, “Radiata” was created. It was made as a mood stabilizer so the masses could deal with the constant slaughter and mayhem around them. Soon the hunters that supplied the arenas with demons were made into idols, only answering to Jesus. They created businesses out of their trade, making most of the money. Soon most of the host of Heaven was comprised of these hunters, leaving the poor and emotionally scarred to starve, or join the demons of Hell. The society within Heaven had devolved to a state of excess and drug driven bureaucracy and corruption, running solely on imprisoning and killing the demons. Radiata was consumed by all, giving them a slower, more apathetic view of their reality. Fashion and dramatizations of execution became the sole interest of the masses, scale-like dresses being made from the fingernails of demons and, gowns from the skin of their infants. Jesus being the king, and the mastermind behind all of the major shifts in interest and power between the Orion (or hunter) corporations.
In the time that all of this has been developed, there has been many attempts at revolution on the side of the demons. They tried many times to use their superior skills of reason to picket the angels for a sense of equality, but were met with extermination. The campaign of Jesus on Earth was so successful that most of the humans still on Earth feared the idea of a Hell or of demons, viewing them as evil creatures that were impure and deserving of damnation. The indoctrination had been so complete that Hell had no defenses to the commonplace attacks of Heaven.
Eventually, the angel's need for Radiata became such that they could no longer take it and produce it at the same time, so a deal was struck with Hell that they could build, and work at Radiata factories for pay, so long as they presented a certain amount of their citizens for execution per quarter. Thus the demons became the proletariat of the afterlife, and the angels, their bourgeoisie.