Van Dorn Don't

When the sun started to get brighter and brighter, we headed for the dark and cool places.

For a while we were safe in the manufacturing caves. The shadows were dirty, but they didn't burn your eyeballs out, or give you melanoma, or make you look like your skin was made of hot dogs.

We stayed away from the edges of the building, which seemed to get edgier and edgier with every passing day.

Eventually we noticed our cave was castling, our castle was caving in. We retreated into other, more interior rooms. The light took over more and more territory, an invading photon army, but we couldn't do anything about it. There wasn't a lot to patch the holes up with. The once nice and cool concrete steamed , and we blockaded doors. We were stuck in the center of a burning piece of paper.

We realized we were definitely, for sure losing. We sort of gave up. It was only a matter of time before the tar of the roof completely melted away. The sunlight pooled like lava lakes around us.

Even the steel walls started to get little deadly holes in them. They might as well have been made of sandstone or salt. Stupid metal walls. Stupid rust.

We sat in the middle of tinderblock floors, and stared at the crumbling glass and mortar above us. We sweat silently. We took off our clothes and pressed our burning skin to the non-sunny parts of the floor. We fanned each other with old user manuals.

I went to the very center of the machine, to the Brain. And I asked the Brain why the ceiling and walls were abandoning us, leaving us as refugees in the brightening gloom. Why was the machine falling apart? How could we put it back together? The Brain said nothing. It never said anything. It was solid and metal too, magical and floaty, but it knew it's time was coming, even if that time came way after ours. It didn't concern itself with soft little fleshies living in its corners. I threw shards of floor metal at it, chips of concrete, old pens and chairs. I spit my very last piece of gum in the whole world at it, which stuck on it's stupid shiny belly. Then we sat down in its shadow, which was the darkest place, and waited.

More Van Dorn pics can be seen here.
The End.