I.

The dog was dying. Ray knew this the way he knew most things—not through information, but through the slow accumulation of evidence that you can't pretend away.

Buster lay on the floor of the trailer, breathing shallow. Twelve years old. The kind of age where a dog's joints turn to glass and its eyes go cloudy. Ray watched him breathe. In. Out. In. Out.

The refrigerator contained one can of beer and a jar of pickles with no lid. The windows were cracked. The rain made a sound like static against the glass.

Ray sat on the couch. He drank the beer. He watched the dog breathe.

II.

The factory was three blocks from the trailer park. Abandoned since the late nineties, when the last steel mill closed and the town began its long, quiet death. Ray sometimes went there to drink, because the police didn't patrol abandoned factories and the rain didn't reach inside.

He found the room by accident. Drunk, stumbling, looking for a wall to lean against. The door was broken—hinged on one side, hanging open like a mouth that had forgotten how to close.

Inside, the floor was covered with something white. Fine powder, scattered like salt. It glowed faintly, the way road salt glows under streetlights.

Ray licked it because he was drunk and curious and had spent forty-two years making decisions he couldn't justify.

It tasted sweet. Like metal and sugar mixed together.

The next morning, his head didn't hurt. It hadn't stopped hurting in fifteen years, but that morning, it didn't.

III.

Ray noticed the changes over days, not hours. His body, which had been soft and aching and tired for a decade, became something else. Harder. Denser.

He walked down Broadway and ran into Mike Kowalski—no relation, just another Kowalski in a town full of them. Mike used to push Ray around at the bar, two fingers in his chest, telling him to move.

Today, Ray didn't move. He looked at Mike. Mike looked away first.

Ray smiled. Not a happy smile. The smile of a man who has discovered a lever and doesn't yet know what it moves.

He went to the factory. He licked more powder.

IV.

The changes accelerated. Ray could lift things he couldn't have moved before. He could walk twenty miles without tiring. He could fight three men at once and win.

He didn't use this strength to find work. He didn't use it to fix anything.

He used it to get drunk more often.

He went to the bar on Friday and started a fight with two men who looked at him wrong. He broke one man's nose and dislocated the other's shoulder. The bartender told him not to come back. Ray laughed. He went to another bar. He fought there too.

He stole from the convenience store on Myrtle. Not because he needed anything. The fridge still had pickles. He stole bread and beer and walked out while the clerk stared, too shocked to call the police.

He bought Buster new dog food. The expensive kind, in a bag that cost more than Ray made in a week. Buster sniffed it and walked away. Ray threw it out.

Dr. Evans saw him at the free clinic. "You look different, Ray."

"Harder."

"Hard isn't good."

Ray didn't answer. He didn't know the difference between hard and good. He only knew that hard didn't hurt as much.

V.

Linda called. Not to apologize. Not to explain. To tell him she was moving to Pittsburgh. New boyfriend. Boyfriend didn't want Ray's daughter near "that alcoholic ex-husband."

Ray hung up the phone. He went to the factory. He licked more powder than he'd ever licked before.

It burned. Not metaphorically—his throat and stomach felt like they were on fire. But the fire felt good, because it was a fire he could control.

His body swelled with power. He could feel his blood moving faster, his muscles tightening, his bones densifying. He felt like he could tear the factory down with his hands.

And then he felt nothing. Not emptiness—worse than emptiness. The absence of the feeling that something might get better.

He stood in the room and looked at the walls. Grey concrete. Cracked cement floor. The smell of rust and damp. No windows. No door—the door was outside.

He didn't know how he'd gotten there. Not tonight. Earlier. Much earlier. When did his life become this? When did the steel mill close and the drinking start and the divorce happen and the dog get old? Was it because of the powder? Or was the powder just making him see what was already there?

He walked home. The trailer was cold. Buster hadn't moved. Ray knelt and put his hand on the dog's head. Buster opened his eyes, looked at him, and closed them again.

Ray sat on the couch. He drank the last beer.

VI.

Buster died on a Thursday. Ray buried him behind the trailer, in the patch of dirt that was more gravel than soil. No marker. No ceremony. Just a pile of dirt that would wash away in the next rain.

He went back inside the trailer. The fridge was empty. It was still raining.

He stood at the window and looked out at the darkness. His body was still strong. He could feel the power moving through his veins, waiting for something to do.

He opened the door and stepped outside. The rain hit his face. He didn't have anywhere to go. He had no destination, no purpose, no reason to move in any particular direction.

He walked.

The streets of Youngstown stretched before him, empty and grey and silent under the streetlights.

He walked.

He was still walking.

OTMES-v2-Code: M1=2,M3=1,M4=6,M5=2,M6=3,M7=1,M8=3,M9=2,M10=3 | N=(3,7) | K=(4,6) | R=0.2 | I=3 | θ=200° | TI=32.50