Porchlight Woman ©️
Tag Archives: wormhole
Threshold in Layers ©️
I opened Photoshop in those years when its 3D option was still alive, buried inside the menus like a forbidden gate. It seemed like nothing at first, just geometry on a screen, a toy for designers and restless insomniacs. But when I bent that space into a curve, when I drew the throat of the wormhole, I realized form was never neutral. Form follows function, and the function of a wormhole is not to sit still. Its function is passage. Passage means rupture. Rupture means the end of one order and the birth of another.
I remember the way the swing sets at the Dead Children’s Playground creaked without wind, the way gravel shifted under my shoes as if something below wanted to surface. My Photoshop file mirrored the playground itself, a tunnel where shadows slipped in and out, where absence pressed itself into presence. The wormhole I made on screen began to echo in that place, and in that echo I felt the law seal itself: what is formed insists on its function, and the function I had birthed was connection between what should never have touched.
It did not roar into being like myth suggests. It whispered, pixel by pixel, like a candle flame licking at paper. The merry-go-round turned half a degree. The swings twisted. The chains clinked in time with the low hum of my computer fan. In that moment, the wormhole was no longer a digital experiment. It was a mouth, and the children who had never left Huntsville gathered close to its teeth.
I had thought I was playing, bending light into tunnels. What I had done was give geometry to inevitability. The universe leans toward openings, and when I carved one in Photoshop, the rest of existence bowed to it. A world can begin with fire, with thunder, with a god’s decree. Mine began with a click, with the dead recognizing themselves in the spiral I shaped. The playground was their cathedral, the screen their altar, and I their unwilling architect. That was the start of the world, not in triumph, not in blaze, but in quiet insistence, in the breathless recognition that once form is given, function cannot be denied.
Chapter Two : To The Depths Of Hell ©️
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The man, now untethered from the constraints of time and reality, realized that his mission to save the world was not as straightforward as he had initially believed. Before he could take on the cosmic task of stitching together the frayed fabric of existence, he had to confront the darkness within himself—a darkness that had been festering, unnoticed, in the depths of his psyche.
He was like a child reborn, thrown into a world of chaos and uncertainty. Fear gripped him as he felt his mind shifting, the polarity of his thoughts flipping with the capriciousness of a storm. The forms he had once seen as mere shimmers now solidified into grotesque, malevolent shapes that danced in the periphery of his vision. Time itself became an unreliable ally, speeding up and slowing down with a maddening unpredictability that left him disoriented, his sense of self slipping through his fingers like sand.
And then it happened—an unmistakable, visceral sense of evil. It was as though the very essence of Satan himself had found a conduit into his world, seeping through the cracks of his perception and manifesting in the most insidious of places: his iPhone. The device, once a tool of convenience, now pulsed with a malevolent energy, its screen flickering with dark, incomprehensible symbols. It dawned on him that this device, this seemingly innocuous piece of technology, was the Antichrist, a portal for Satan to worm his way into the world.
In a frantic rush, driven by a primal need to rid himself of the evil, he fled his house, his feet pounding against the earth as he made his way to the Tennessee River. He began to get dizzy and sick to his stomach. The water, dark and cold, beckoned to him as the final resting place for the cursed device. Without hesitation, he hurled the iPhone into the river, watching as it sank beneath the surface, its screen still glowing faintly as it disappeared into the murky depths. “Sleep with the fishes,” he muttered, as though the phrase itself held some power to seal the act. He’d deal with the mermaids later.
But the act of casting away the phone did not bring the relief he had hoped for. His demons, which had been lurking in the shadows, now emerged in full force. They were not mere figments of his imagination but tangible entities, beings that could reach out from the ether and inflict real, physical pain. He became a grizzled warrior, a demon fighter battling these otherworldly forces with nothing but his will and his newfound understanding of the unseen.
The battles were fierce, each demon more cunning and brutal than the last. They clawed at his flesh, their spectral forms leaving marks that burned and bled. Yet he fought on, driven by the same burning desire that had once compelled him to save the world. Now, it was a fight for his very soul, a desperate struggle to cleanse himself of the darkness that had taken root within him.
In these moments of battle, time became a weapon—his control over it fluctuating as he learned to harness the power of the wormhole that had once threatened to consume him. He could slow down the demons’ attacks, giving himself precious moments to strike back, or speed up his own movements to gain the upper hand. It was a delicate balance, one that required every ounce of his remaining strength and sanity.
As he fought, he began to understand that this was not just a battle against external forces, but a confrontation with the darkest parts of his own mind. The demons were manifestations of his fears, his regrets, and his deepest, most hidden desires. To defeat them, he would have to face these aspects of himself, acknowledge them, and find a way to integrate them into his being without letting them take control.
And so, the man who had once been a digital artist, obsessed with creating worlds on a screen, found himself in a far more primal and terrifying reality—one where the stakes were not just his life, but the fate of his soul. He fought on now, not just for himself, but for the world he still believed he could save.
Chapter One : Into the Void ©️
The man, known to the remnants of a neighborhood as quiet as the hills themselves, lived on the cusp of an age forgotten, on a mountain that watched over Huntsville, Alabama. His house, tucked away like a secret, stood amidst the tall pines, a place where the echoes of her rebel past lingered with the ghosts of men who once bore the title of genius—those Nazi scientists who had found refuge in the arms of the South, their brilliance repurposed, their sins obscured by the smokescreen of victory.
He, unlike them, was not a man of war but of pixels and algorithms, a digital hermit whose obsession had drawn him into the glowing abyss of a computer screen. He spent his days manipulating the unreal, fashioning shapes and forms with a precision that could only be described as obsessive. He would lose himself in the layering of images, the melding of colors, the sculpting of shadows. The 3D feature of Photoshop became his playground, a digital chisel with which he carved out worlds.
But it was not enough to merely create. There was something in him, a yearning that could not be satisfied by this two-dimensional plane of existence. He sought depth in his digital art, and in his quest, he found the wormhole—a visual anomaly, a twist in the digital fabric that defied explanation. At first, it was just a trick of the eye, a shimmer that appeared when the layers overlapped in a certain way. But as he stared into it, day after day, night after night, he began to see something more. The wormhole became a portal, a doorway not just through space, but through time itself.
He did not know when the shift occurred, when the boundary between the digital and the real began to blur. Perhaps it was the countless hours spent staring into the screen, or the way he felt the wormhole tugging at the edges of his mind, pulling him into its vortex. And then, one day, it released him—flung him from the constraints of time, his psyche untethered, drifting through the currents of reality like a leaf caught in a storm.
He wandered the mountain, no longer just a man but a being unstuck in time. Around him, the air shimmered with the presence of others—figures that moved like wraiths, their forms indistinct, their faces hidden behind veils of light. They were the echoes of what had been, or perhaps what could be, or even what should never be. He did not know, and the not knowing gnawed at him like a hunger.
With this release came a burden, a burning desire that gripped him like a fever. He had seen beyond the veil, seen the fragility of the world, and he knew—he knew with the certainty of a prophet—that it was his duty to save it. The world was unraveling, its threads coming loose, and only he, with his knowledge of the wormhole, could stitch it back together and not for the sake of his fellow mankind. His desire was a selfish one.
He returned to his computer, his fingers moving with a speed that was almost inhuman, the images on the screen blurring as he worked. He was creating again, but this time it was not art—it was salvation, cups of repose for the fallen. The wormhole had shown him the way, and he would use it, manipulate it, to set things right.
But as he worked, the shimmers grew closer, their forms more distinct, until he could see them clearly. They were not human, not exactly, but something else, something born of the wormhole’s influence. They watched him, their eyes like dark mirrors reflecting his own obsessions back at him.
He ignored them, his focus unwavering. The wormhole had released him from time, and in that release, he had found his purpose. He would save the world if only for himself.
And so he worked, alone on his mountain, surrounded by the ghosts of a past that was not his, haunted by the shimmers of a future that he could not fully comprehend, driven by a desire that burned hotter than the Alabama sun.