Paucity

"QTNA, amirite, fam?"
"Fam," said Pestilence, his gaunt white face bright in the sodium streetlight as the car passed momentarily beneath it, "what the hell is QTNA?"
"Questions That Need Answering," said Famine.  He sounded happy but his face was drawn and his eyes suggested tears.  "All the ones on fleek, right, like, the ones that are sleek right, the ones that arise in the night, amirite?"
Pestilence turned the heater in the car on and shivered.  Technically he never felt the cold, but he had the sensation that this was one of those nights, the ones when the old gods woke up and took a turn around the property to see where things were being neglected.  Some sensitives described it as the feeling of a storm over the horizon but headed your way, others described it as a bone-chilling, bed-wetting terror that pressed down like a pillow over your face at midnight.
"What," he said slowly, precisely, "is wrong with you Fam?  You're practically incomprehensible these days."
"QTNA, amirite, fam?" said Famine miserably.  "Take a left here, bro."
On the left was a sheer drop, fifty metres down to a concrete carpark behind a big box retailer, but Pestilence flicked on the indicator and took the turn as smoothly as a racing driver.  The car behind him slowed at first, the driver unable to understand the indicator, then fishtailed as the driver stamped on his brakes and lost control watching the car in front of him drive off the road.  Red taillights disappeared downwards and the driver wrenched his door open and ran to the edge of the road, unwilling to believe that he'd just seen a suicide.
Below him were the floodlights illuminating the carpark, and a complete absence of wreckage.

Pestilence's car hummed softly as it drove through the air.  Around them the world had changed, becoming more shadowy and less substantial, and they might be driving on a cobweb bridge spun by the world's largest spider.
"Better than the horses," said Pestilence after a while.  "Don't get me wrong, I liked them, but they're harder to ride, and they get all temperamental and jittery when something big's happening.  None of that with these machines."
"Yeah," said Famine.  He drawled, sounding Texan.  Then he yawned.  "Jesus, bro, how long have we been away?"
An aurora rippled across the sky in front of them reflecting off the polished black bonnet of the car.  Pale greens and blues swapped large bands of themselves around like a rubik's cube preparing to be solved.
"Five years," said Pestilence.  "It didn't feel like it.  I couldn't have told you that back in the World.  I'd have thought it was only a few days."
"Too long," said Famine.  "Too much belief in us these days."
"Deeper than belief," said Pestilence.  "We're victims of our own success, you know?  People know deep down that we're real and that we walk amongst them.  They're proud of it, in some odd way.  You know they're worried that I'm going to win against their antibiotics?  I attended a conference on it.  Everyone knew I was real, everyone knew in their hearts that I was going to win, all they could do was hold me back for a few days.  I could have proclaimed myself King in that hall, and they'd have raised a temple to me."
"Same," said Famine.  "They all think they're pretty much one harvest away from being guests at my table.  It's like two thousand years ago again, only they're somehow starving because they're too afraid to eat."
"Why are you all incomprehensible though, Fam?"
"Hah."  Famine's laugh was practically a sneer.  "Paucity of vocabulary, mate.  There's a famine of language going on, and it's caught up with me.  Empty words, empty phrases, sounds parroted by the sublebrities of the day and mimicked across social media.  I can read all the dictionaries you want, I can sit and discourse for hours with the erudite and intellectual, but at the level of the lowest common denominator it's on fleek, amirite?  Fam?"
"You're a mystery to me, Fam fam," said Pestilence.  "Am I doing it right?"
"QTNA, mate," said Famine.  "What happened to the other two?"
"War's got groupies," said Pestilence.  "I think he's hiding from them.  And us, for that matter, I don't think he's handling the fame so well."
"And the big boy?"
Pestilence drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watching the aurora dance for a few seconds.
"Last I heard," he said, with reluctance clearly audible, "he'd invented the Selfiecide."
Fam laughed, a hearty belly laugh that seemed wrong coming from someone thin enough to think emaciated was a compliment.  "You've got to hand it to him," he said. "He moves with the times."
"You'd think he'd be busy enough."  Pestilence sounded disapproving, his voice tight and prissy.
"He's only getting busier," said Famine.  "Like us all though, amirite?"
Pestilence looked over at Famine, wondering if there was irony there, and then peered through the windscreen.  "Ah," he said. "We're heading back in.  It was nice talking to you, Fam."
"I can still hear you, bro," said Famine quietly.  "It's just that it's a bit of an echo chamber at the moment.  You can still spill the serious tea with me, you know, bro?  I've got the screenshots."
Despite himself Pestilence giggled, and the car transitioned from the unreal back to the real, entered the World on a dusty, empty highway.  A little distance away the red light of a diner's neon sign flickered a welcome, and somewhere far away in a lost direction forces that might be gods paused to observe that there were Horsemen out there still, untouchable by any of them.

Loneliness

My mother insisted she was lonely for almost all of her life. According to her brothers, both of whom refuse to allow me to call them uncle, she was loneliest when she was a conjoined twin, and seemed to come out of it for a while after her twin died in a skiing accident. Then six months later the doctors separated her from her dead, and increasingly gangrenous, twin, and she went back to being lonely again.
My father, who has a court order keeping me out of shouting range from him, wrote me a letter years ago, before things between us deteriorated, saying that my mother was lonely when he first met her, but that she seemed to become happier as they got to know each other. "There was," he wrote, "twenty-five minutes the day before our wedding, when we were the happiest we've ever been. I really think your mother came alive then." After the wedding things went downhill rapidly; on the second night of their honeymoon she slept on the couch; on the third she booked a separate room in the hotel. "I have no idea how you were conceived," he wrote in the last paragraph of the letter, "physically or mentally. I certainly would have vetoed the design document for you if I'd been shown it first."
The doctor who delivered me is currently prosecuting a case against me for stalking and clinginess, though his lawyer has sent a letter that suggests he'd be being far crueler if he didn't think it wasn't completely my fault. Before things came to that, he had told me that my mother seemed happiest while in labour, and as soon as I was born she was disinterested. "We thought it was rapid onset post-partum depression," his letter to me stated, "and we were thrilled that we'd be able to study it and write it up as a paper. But your mother refused to self-harm, wasn't interested in reading Sylvia Plath, and showed admirable, if upsetting, caution around open windows and high rooftops."
My childhood memories are a little strange, according to my therapist, who has put her rates up six times in the last six visits. I have almost no memory at all of my mother, but I refer to things happening that need another person to be there. "It's as if," she's mused, "your mother were somehow invisible to you most of the time."
"What mother?" I replied.
After my therapist convinced me that I must have had a mother to be born, I went looking, and a concerted facebook campaign found her (I won't give my facebook details as I have a lifetime ban from the site from over-friendly behaviour). I went to visit her and found her attending an artist-commune. She was sat in a meadow, her eyes streaming with hayfever, daubing brown paint onto a beige canvas in the likeness of Mahatma Gandhi. When I approached, she looked round and somehow stuck her brush straight through her canvas.
She wouldn't say much, only that I had family and that she would provide their names and addresses; the above tale relates how well that has turned out. She seemed listless, and shortly after I left she beat herself into a coma with a thin volume of Sylvia Plath poetry and died a few days later. I've sent the volume to the doctor who delivered me in case he can now write that paper.
I think I may have inherited my mother's loneliness.