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 ^{(it's beta!)}

He will come to your church services and disguise profanities as sneezes and coughs. He wears his sunglasses at night simply so that he doesn't have to look at you. Within his black leather trenchcoat he carries only malice and contempt. He likes children because they are the only ones who can successfully pull off the facade of "innocence". He tells everyone that "God's a fun drunk."

Brother Scorn likes his coffee how he likes his life; bleak and meaningless.

He will spike the punch bowl with liquid meth. If you own a cat, there's a good chance he has punched it in the face when you weren't around. He has convinced a total of 9,342 people that Starbucks is actually the Second Coming. He sneaks into peoples' houses at night and plants plastic explosives under their Caps Lock keys.

Brother Scorn is a three-time widower. The clip still has five bullets in it.

He believes that, with enough propulsion, anything can be a deadly projectile. If he could have any superpower it would be the ability to make you stop talking [or maybe lazer eyes]. He understands that the world is against him, so he goes easy on it. If you haven't graduated college yet, he doubts you ever will. He calls vampires pussies for being afraid of crucifixes [however he maintains that the garlic thing is a load of crock].

Brother Scorn sees your misery and despair and raises you a punch in the kidney, you whiny prick.

He stands outside the church and charges $5.00 admission, then blows his earnings at the liquor store across the street. He doesn't believe in violence; only chaotic hilarity. He wants to apologize for the way he acted last night; he thought you were your mother. No one knows for sure where he lives, but some speculate that it is somewhere between you and all of your hopes and dreams.

Brother scorn firmly believes that you could never atone for your sins, so why not end it now before you make things worse for yourself?

He wears a crucifix he forged himself from a melted-down Star of David. He goes to confession booths not to confess but to inform the father that he knows who they were with last night. He doesn't believe in pre-marital sex, only short, loveless, and hilariously disastrous marriages. He likes to spend his evenings in a hot tub, surrounded by women, drinking champange, reading your whiny, pathetic, pseudo-suicidal blog posts, and laughing uproariously.

Brother Scorn is not a man to be trifled with, yet he encourages it. He hasn't gotten to use his pimp hand since the eighties.

Brother Scorn: *ahem* "Good evening ladies, gentlemen and handsome little consumers of our glorious society. I, your friendly local Brother Scorn, am here to inform you of one thing and one thing only. I see all of you. I see you right now and I can STILL see you. I've seen you in the morning when you leave the house, get in your car or the bus [or just shoes] and go to school or work or simply "out"[and I see you when you just hide out inside]. I see how you look at the people around you and how they look at you. I see the way you dress, the way you act, and the people you talk to. I hear the things you say and the things people say about you, especially behind your back. I hear the music you listen to and don't even try to tell me that it's good. You're not the judge of that. I've seen the things you love and the things you fear. I see what's lurking around that corner before you do. I know who you are whether or not you do and I know what made you that way. Here's a hint, it isn't what you think it is. Whatever happens to you, I saw it coming. I've seen your lifestyle and quite frankly I'm just surprised you have one.

"Now, I could go on all day and likely freak you right the fuck out, but I've got 'bigger fish to fry', and while I certainly enjoy having access to this tremendous amount of insight, I must tell you something.

"I am not impressed."

He leaves copies of Penthouse in the pews after service. He revves his engine at old ladies crossing the street in front of him. He makes thousands by selling the ashes of his deceased relatives on eBay. Instead of sugar, he lent a cup of cocaine the woman next door. She now rots in prison and he holds parties in her abandoned house.

Brother Scorn has pushed the envelope, and left it ticking.

He took up smoking simply to support the tobacco industry. He followed you home last night, and has committed the directions to memory. He made his first bomb out of his little sister's EZ-Bake Oven. He attended last year's Spanish Bull Run, as a rider. He was the one who played Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" at your mother's funeral.

Brother Scorn invites you to join his latest agenda of escapades. Bring the family.

He'll use your Christmas lights for target practice. He has turned telemarketers into sobbing wretches just to warm-up. For halloween, he walked around with his arms held straight out to the sides and told people "I'm Jesus". He makes it a point to, for each of his nephew's birthdays, sneak a swarm of wild animals into the kid's house, one for each year he's been alive. Last year it was monkeys.

Brother Scorn will not rest until he has... Oh dear God, what is he up to now?

He walks down empty streets with a wrench, opening every fire hydrant he finds. He taps against the pews in church with his feet, not only annoying the congregation, but also forming satanic messages in Morse code. He uses a rosary as a wallet chain. He once broke up with a girl by carving the word "BITCH" backwards into his palm, then slapping her. One of his favorite pastimes is convincing people that he isn't real by writing "fictional" prose about himself and posting it online.

Brother Scorn has just busted through the fourth wall in a tank. He's laughing a lot and has an axe for some reason.

Fucking run.

He sometimes sets up "Baby Dropboxes" at busy streetcorners. His basement is full of coffins he crafts in his spare time, so when someone in his extended family dies, they can just get one from him. He visted an insane asylum once, just for fun. By the time he left, the roles between the doctors and the patients had all been reversed. He once set up a flight simulator booth in front of the former site of the World Trade Center.

You're trapped in a room with Brother Scorn. You try to open the door but realize the knob is gone. It, as well as several dozen others, are in the sack he grips tightly in his hand.

Screaming will only make it worse.

What the hell is going on outside?

They told me they would stop. They wanted to fix it up some more, but I said it looked fine. That was a lie, of course. It looked like crap. I just wanted them off my property. Surely these aren't the same guys.

Well, I'm looking out the window, but I don't see anything. The noise has stopped. What the hell was that? It sounded like someone was scraping against my house. Was it those guys? Damnit, I fucking told them it looked fine.

Well, I get up and grab my coat and a flashlight and slip on my boots. I go ahead and grab the bat, too. Whether it's those guys or not, if they're still there...

Well, they should have paid attention to the sign I had up.

I walk up to the front and shove open the screen door, kinda hard, thinking maybe I can surprise whoever's out there.

I look around and don't see anybody. Must have just been some vandals. Probably the brat kids of that family that moved in down the street. Yeah, the parents were nice enough, but their shitty kids grew up in the city. Never liked the city, myself. Just a concentration of all of mankind's mistakes. Horrible inventions that shouldn't have been, killing the earth and wasting money that we never even really had.

I walk over to the side of the house, where I heard the noise; the scratching. I turn the corner and turn on the flashlight. Sure enough, someone had been scratching at the paint. They fucking scratched into the wood. Damnit, I'd have to call those guys over again. Damnit.

I almost walk back inside, but I notice something. They had scratched words into it. What?

"Dear Father,

I was going to talk to you face to face, but I think the surprise I left you will be more entertaining. You'll find it in the morning.

Love, B. Scorn

PS. tell mom i'll stop by her place next."

Well, fuck...

Fuck.

It was a peaceful neighborhood. A happy neighborhood. A green, sunny, pleasant, peaceful, happy neighborhood lined with trees, white picket fences and shiny new minivans. Birds chirped idly in the trees and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. A somewhat chill wind flitted through the air, but the all-encompassing warmth of the sun still comforted the skin. Neighbors greeted eachother as they walked out to get their morning paper, wind chimes jangled, and children played in the empty street.

One child, however, wasn't playing with the others. Instead, he sat on his doorstep, arms wrapped around his legs, chin rested limply between his knees as he stared blankly ahead, looking at nothing in particular. He had light brown hair, somewhat curly. It hung over his ears. The freckles on his cheeks contrasted with his light face. His eyes were a crystal blue.

The boy yawned, clenching his eyes shut. When he opened them, he jumped. There was a man standing in front of him. The man held a finger to his mouth, hinting for him to stay quiet. The boy obeyed, understanding full well that his man was an adult.

"Hello there." the man spoke, smiling brightly. After a few moments of silence, the boy responded. "Hi."

"What's your name?" The man was still smiling. Again, a few moments of silence, then, "My mom told me not to talk to strangers."

"Yeah, she's a talky bitch, eh?"

The boy simply looked up at him blankly.

"Never mind. Hey, howzabout this?" He knelt down nearer the same level as the boy. "I'll tell you my name, and then you tell me yours, and then we won't be strangers anymore, huh?"

The boy seemed to consider this for a moment, then smiled a bit. "Okay."

The man returned the smile and held out an open hand towards the boy. "You can call me Mr. Scorn. And how about you?" The boy slowly put his small hand in the man's larger palm and allowed it to be grasped, softly. "I'm Brandon." he said, with a shy smile on his face.

"Well there we are. I'm no stranger anymore. So come on, talk to me." He sat himself down on the doorstep with Brandon.

The Boy shifted where he sat for a moment, then looked back up to the man. "About what, Mr. Scorn?"

"Oh, I dunno. Anything." He pondered for a moment. "Like, what did Santa bring you for Christmas?" The boy liked that question. His face lit up and his smile grew wider. But still, he didn't really say. The man smiled knowingly. "He brought you a lot, huh?" The boy just nodded, still smiling.

"Did he bring you everything he asked for?"

Then the smile started to fade. Nodding understandingly, the man placed a hand on his small shoulder. "Ah, I see. I know how that feels. Were you upset?" A nod. "Yeah. But you know what? You shouldn't let it get to you, 'cuz that's not what Christmas is about." Then the boy piped up. "I know what Christmas is about!" he said. "It's about Jesus and his birthday."

The man smiled broadly at this. "Yeah, that's right. And you know what Jesus did for us?" The boy nodded. "Yeah. He died for our sins. The teacher at church told me."

"And do you know how he died?"

After a moment, the boy shook his head in the negative.

The man's smile grew wider.

"Well, you see, first, they drug him out in front of a large crowd of people, everyone in the city. They drug him in front of them and threw him to the ground. They then stripped him naked and taunted him. They called him names and laughed at him while he just lay there, covered in sweat, dirt, and grime, wheezing for breath.

"And you know what they did then? Why, they whipped him. Yeah, they whipped him good. Gashed his back up to hell. There was blood everywhere, drenching his back and pooling to the ground, and you know what? The people kept jeering him, cursing him, calling him a fake and generally showing their dislike of him. They also threw stones at him and beat him.

"But you know, he never once tried to defend himself. He just lay there and took it. He didn't fight back, he didn't try to plead with them or even try to get away. You know why? Because he already knew his fate. He knew that there was no going back, and that by the end of the day he'd be dead.

"So, he kept going along with it. They made a large wooden cross, bigger than him, and made him carry it. He carried it through the city, along with other who were being punished like him, and along the streets where he walked were more people, more nonbelievers yelling at him and following him, wanting nothing more than to see the self-proclaimed Son of God perish gruesomely like a common felon.

"And when they finally reached their destination, the hill, they stuck the cross into the earth and placed Jesus on it. But of course, he wouldn't stay up there, so they had to stick him to it. You know what they used? Well, nails worked on other things, so why not people, eh? So they spread his arms out along the wood and shoved large nails through his hands and into the cross. They did the same with his feet. It was only by some miracle that his spine didn't collapse on itself as he hung there, his life slowly and painfully draining from his body in long pulsing streams of thick, scarlet blood. Of course, the people still weren't ready to give up their fun. They took a vine of thorns and crafted it into a crude 'crown', which they jammed onto his head. Of course, to them this was a laugh riot and they jokingly bowed to him and called him the almighty 'King of the Jews'.

"This continued for hours until, finally, he breathed his last breath, and looked up into the sky, and at that moment, when the roars of hatred from the crowd grew into a monstrous cacophony of white noise, Jesus' mind stopped.

"Only a handful mourned his death.

"But it's alright now, 'cuz because he died, people like you and me can get away with whatever we want and still get into heaven when we die. Isn't that neat?"

The man smiled down at the little boy and patted him on the shoulder. The boy simply stared up at the man, his eyes open wide, as his lip began to quiver. His face was pale.

"Well, I don't know about you, but I'm a busy man. I'll be headin' out now, but I want you to remember what we talked about. Oh, and if your parents ask you about the back yard, I may need to you take the rap for that. Just remember that I know where you live and what happened to your dad's spare house key. Alright, be good. See ya."

It had been so long. I had almost forgotten about him, just like everything else. I couldn't see anything else anymore. None of it was real, or might as well not have been. It was all broken and meaningless to me now. Everything was. I wasn't sure why I was still alive. Looking at the world was like looking through a shattered mirror that only reflected more shattered mirrors, each extending into an eternity of pointless history that wasn't even real. Still, this allowed me to see things differently. Perhaps for how they were, or perhaps for how they were simply meant to be seen.

I was only a little tweaked.

At first, I should have been relieved. I was the only one in that alley. I'm pretty sure it knew that. It was closing in on me, knowing that I alone wouldn't be able to stop it. It was right, too. It was ready to swallow me, but then he came.

I could almost feel the concrete beneathe my boots shiver at his presence. The air was still, caught in a tight gasp as my surroundings spotted him. The rain parted before him and retreated in all directions. Light bended and refracted around him, and at moments I could have sworn he was the beast himself, others, a pristine, though terrifying angel, his halo bearing the sins and atrocities of existence over countless millenia.

And he was looking at me. Around me. His eyes were shielded, hidden. Not hidden, just masked. They were everywhere. Of course he was looking at me.

He didn't move. He just addressed me, like he knew me. Did he know me? I felt his gaze skewer me and hold me down as his words slowly lilted through the beaten, docile air and slithered into my mind, unbidden yet unimpeded.

"You sad little wretch." his words grated against my skull, playfully testing my mettle.

"It really speaks volumes about the human race how someone so pristine, so pure and loved, can become brittle and decayed, humbled before the hopelessness of their cause. And you know, it was never even the cause. No, you had that right. Methods and theories aside, you spoke a good message. But it was just you. You aren't strong enough to carry the weight of so many lives so great a distance. You would have tripped over the first cobble stone. Who would have been there to catch them?

"Just so you know, He doesn't like me doing this. Still, He's not going to stop me. It gets the job done. I'm not so sure He can touch me, anyway. And it's nothing personal against you, Father Albert. It never is."

The words were strange, like he was talking to someone else, but they were meant for me. Why would he address me? Why would the destroyer, the Scorn of Spirits address me? It was an awesome and terrifying experience. My spine quivered at the power hidden behind his voice and I retreated into myself once more.

Still, his final parting words danced before me.

"I want you to know that I gain nothing from my work, nor do I take any pride in it. It's just incredibly fun."

My Dear Brother,

Please do not read this letter to Mother, as I fear it will upset her and I do not want her worrying about me.

Today I believe I have seen the Devil.

None of us had seen him before today. He was tall, and he wore black glasses and a long coat. He did not speak to anyone as he walked into the town, but the crowds parted before him. He walked through the market and into the square without speaking to anyone, and smiled. The band was playing today, and he seemed especially drawn to them. I watched, fascinated, as he gradually began to dance to the song they played. No one else had been dancing, but he seemed unreasonably compelled to.

I am almost loathe to say it, brother, and please do not get the wrong idea (or tell Mother) but I was intoxicated by this man's dancing. It was elegant, it was graceful, it was emotional, but at the same time filled with fire and lust, his feet sliding and stomping so naturally to the rhythm while his arms seemed to rise and fall, quickly and smoothly, as though floating on top of the music. It was mesmerizing.

When the band stopped playing, he approached them and tossed a coin into a guitar case. An American coin of some kind. As the man walked off, I turned around and began to continue my work, but then I heard shouting from behind me. I looked to see the members of the band suddenly wrestling with eachother. They were fighting over the coin. At first I didn't want to believe that, but I soon determined that when one of them dropped it and they each scrambled to the ground to be the one to pick it up.

Soon, others nearby began to investigate what was going on. When some noticed it, they too ran over and began to join in the fight. In less than a minute everyone in the square was brawling, as if fighting for their lives. I do not think any of them even remembered the coin. I looked on in disbelief and horror as I watched the people I knew to be sensible and caring people fight eachother with everything they had and with such hate and ferocity. I could not understand.

As it grew to a more dangerous size, I quickly retreated from the square and continued running to the outermost edge of the town before I stopped to catch my breath. No one was around, which was good, I thought. Everyone I had seen as I ran had a strange new light in their eyes as they all ran toward the square. They were not the same people I had greeted and often helped every day. These were wild animals created by an altogether frightening force.

As I stood at the edge of the village, catching my breath, I soon began to hear a sound. It was a humming sound. I turned to see the man from before. The man with the black glasses and the long coat. He was humming the song from before as he tapped his foot on the ground. He looked at me and smiled, and I couldn't look away.

"Do not be frightened." he told me. "They are not after you, but something altogether out of their own reach. They will die before they can attain it."

His hand rose to his glasses as though he would lower them. Out of overwhelming fear, I squinted my eyes closed and raised my arms to hide my face. I do not know what I expected, but I do not in any way regret that reaction.

After a few moments I opened my eyes again. The man was gone.

I did not go back into the village. Instead I ran to the next village, and am still there. I have warned the people here of the man, but they did not believe me. I do not know what to do, but I am afraid to go back to my village. I think I will stay here at least a while longer. If you send a letter here and I am not here to get it, I will make sure it finds me somehow.

with earnest love,

your brother,

Johano

ps: there is talk of a strange man in the village. Please wait to send another letter until you hear from me again.

I met an angel, mommy.

I heard him just as I was falling asleep. He was singing. It was wonderful, but I couldn't understand the words. I got up and went to the window to listen. I think he heard me because he started talking to me.

I introduced myself, and I heard him laugh. It was a nice laugh. He seemed playful. But when I asked for his name, he told me it didn't matter. It was strange, but after that he started talking some more.

I couldn't understand all of it, but I remember he said something about... how "fragile" the world was. I asked him about that because I didn't know what he meant. He told me that nothing lasted forever. He said that everything always came to an end and it was just lucky that they started over. Like life. And that everything depends on everything else. Because of that, if one thing changes, so does everything else, and nothing remains "constant". He told me that soon something will come along, like a strong gust of wind, and everything will fall onto itself.

I told him that sounded kind of like the "apocalypse" that I had read about at church, and I asked if that's what he was talking about. He laughed some more, and I didn't know why. But then he told me that maybe it was, but that it probably wouldn't be God's work at all.

He said that God already tried that, and the weapon was still wandering around somewhere.

Then I heard another voice with him. It was a woman. I couldn't tell what she was saying, but after a little bit, the man spoke to me again. He told me he had some preparing to do, and that no one seems to know how unstable things really are. That they wouldn't realize until too late.

Before he left, he told me to call him Saint Tribulation. He also gave me his glasses.

I tried them on, but I don't think they work right. I don't know what it is I see, but it hurts.

Do you think all angels hurt like that?