cytoplastik.com --- artists-flo

"You still sick for mother?"

The boy regarded the madman through the veil of the tangled spiral locks that hung obscuring before his face. The inquisitive expression that accompanied the question seemed out of place on the madman's wild face. Too focused. Too aware.

Framed by the boy's hair, the madman was dressed in tattered rags in colors long faded into anonimity which hung from his body like seaweeds. His face was ageless, covered here and there with whispy hairs, tatoos for eyebrows and an assortment of wires which sprouted from his head in place of hair. When the boy had met him, the madman had been making his steady way along the old highway which had eventually brought them both to this sprawling metropolis in the middle of the wasteland, muttering quietly to himself about tornadoes and friends long dead.

This was the first time he'd addressed the boy directly.

"Well?" the madman poked, tapping one dirty bare foot impatiently and giving the general impression that the boy's obstinance was impeding vital progress.

The question felt too pointed, the boy decided to stall for time,

"What the fuck are you talking about? I just followed you for a hundred miles-"

"Thirty, I counted the mile markers."

"-the whole way you act like you don't even notice me, and now you ask me about my mother? Who the hell are you?"

The madman grinned smugly, "I am Sain."

"Yeah right. I know a crackpot when I see one."

"They robbed you away from the nest too early, little bird. It shows in your bearing, and in the way you react to the females of your kind."

"Shut up!" the boy drew away from the madman defensively.

Earlier that day, the madman had stopped trotting along the highway before a pair of obelisks that had no doubt once marked the boundraries of a long forgotten kingdom that had once laid claim to these lands. They had been sitting on a ledge, the boy watching other travelers of the old highway go past while the madman subsided into a catatonic state which he presumably lapsed into instead of sleep. A young girl with large curious eyes and a friendly smile had detached herself from a group going by, came over and addressed the boy,

"Hi, what's your name?"

He'd broken into a cold sweat. His shoulders shot up convulsively and a practiced yet involuntary jerk of his head threw his hair over his face.

"Dee" the boy squeaked. He made an effort to bring himself under control. Tried to look confidently into her eyes, sit up straight, smile back, breathe normally all with varying degress of total successlessness. The girl was visibly taken aback by the spectacle.

"Come on," her companions called to her. She'd eyed him up and down once more and had run off to be with her friends. He'd felt horrible about the whole affair.

And now the crazy bastard was rubbing his nose in it.

"What the hell do you know about it, freak?"

The madman didn't seem to register the question. The smug expression was still loitering on his face, seeming to goad the boy.

"Why are you following me, boy?" the madman raised a semicircle of radial triangles in lue of an eyebrow.

Dee felt an old familiar nausea in the pit of his stomach.

"If you don't want me around-"

"Why don't you just answer one of my bloody questions, stupid?"

The boy took a deep breath.

"I don't know man. I was just walking along, spotted you, and followed you on a random impulse."

The madman nodded curtly, apparently satisfied. He scratched absently at the scalp which presumably existed somewhere beneath the wires growing out of his head and said,

"You know, you've got a bad habit of second-guessing your own good instincts. You're fortunate to have found me."

The boy kicked a rock on the cobblestones in the characteristic gesture of jaded youth everywhere.

"Oh yeah? So are you some wise old buddha wannabe whose going to impart the secrets of the universe to me?"

The madman burst into a cackling convulsive fit of laughter that shook his whole being and rolled on the floor of the street howling for a while. The boy stood fixed in his place getting angrier and more frustrated. He was about to say something snappy and storm off to find a new traveling companion when the madman leaped into a crouch before him and swiftly backed him up against a wall.

"I" he said, suddenly lucid, fixing the boy with a stare that would have pinned a falling boulder in mid-air, "am the programmer."

thar she blows! this is really just fillertext.

who's the hand behind the door?