DASnot.
Characters.
Worlds. Stories.

Brain Dead / DANIEL SOKEY

Chapter One — The Party

There was a lot of hate in that boy. Hate and anger and something else nobody had a decent name for yet. Most of them saw it coming, or said they did after the fact, because people love being prophets once the house is already on fire. They loved saying they knew. They loved saying it was bound to happen. They loved saying somebody should have done something sooner, as if sooner was not standing right there with a cup in its hand the whole night.

The party started small. That is how those things always start in the stories people tell later. A few people. A keg outside. Smoke upstairs. Music coming out of speakers nobody owned but everybody touched. Then the yard filled. Then the driveway filled. Then the road filled. Then it was practically the whole school spread across a property that was not mine, acting like it had always belonged to them.

Years later I would still wonder how word traveled that fast. There were other parties. Plenty of parties. Dumb ones, loud ones, sad ones, backyard ones with warm beer and one kid crying behind a shed. But none of them turned into that. None of them became the night everybody seemed to be waiting for.

This was the one.

This was the night that changed my life. Maybe not the world. I am not holy enough to say the world, though some days I get close to thinking it. But a town, yes. A city, maybe. A whole crooked line of people walking around for years with the same little piece of that night stuck under their tongue.

INCISION / DANIEL SOKEY

1. The Last Breath

The last breath left her lungs at 7:57AM.

That was not the normal time for work. Not the normal time for dying either, if there is such a thing. The room had the ugly patience of a place that already knew what happened before I did.

Nancy sat near the morning light with her long hair twisted into a bun. Tea in her left hand. A book in her right. Steam lifted from the cup like something trying to escape before the rest of us knew we should.

I had paid five dollars for the morning meal.

That part stayed with me.

Not the sirens. Not the names they asked me to repeat. Not the cold shape of the questions. Five dollars. Morning meal.

Her hand around the cup. The small bend in the page where her thumb had been.

My head ached when I woke. I remember that too. A dull pressure behind the eyes, as if something had been knocking from the inside all night and finally gave up.

Her name was Nancy.

I say it plainly because later there would be too many other names. Names carved into doors. Names printed on notices.

Names read from lists by men who never looked up. Names shortened into numbers. Names buried under new initials.

Names folded into MAAS files and quarantine maps and public grief statements.

But before all that, there was Nancy.

FEVER ROOMS / DANIEL SOKEY

1. The Fever Rooms Did Not Close

The fever rooms did not close after MAAS fell.

They simply stopped calling them fever rooms.

That was the first lie of the new city.

The second lie was healing.

The third was voluntary.

Elise learned to hate soft words before she learned to sleep again.

Soft words were worse than hard ones.

A hard word had the decency to arrive with boots. A hard word slammed doors, painted red Xs, seized photographs, measured wounds, and called grief a public hazard.

Soft words came with tea.

Soft words came with blankets.

Soft words came printed in calm blue ink on clean paper.

Support.

Transition.

Closure.

Continuance.

That last one was new.

It appeared first on a white van parked outside the old stadium, where the fever rooms had been dismantled in name only.

The cots were still there.

The patients were still there.

The smell of disinfectant and old breath still pressed itself into the walls.

Only the signs had changed.

The Living Archive / DANIEL SOKEY

1. The Name Came Back Wrong

The first thing returned to me was my own name, misspelled.

Not in a box.

Not in a bag.

Not tagged, sealed, witnessed, stamped, cross-referenced, or apologized over by some tired clerk with soft hands and dead eyes.

It came back on my skin.

Blue ink beneath the first layer, raised like a bruise trying to become language.

DANIAL.

That was what it said.

Not Daniel.

DANIAL.

One letter wrong and the whole body felt filed under somebody else.

I found it on the inside of my left forearm at 6:13AM, though I had learned not to trust clocks after Nancy. The apartment was gray. The blinds were bent. Rain made the window look like something had been breathing against it all night.

For a while, I only stared.

A man can wake with blood on him and understand the world has touched him.

A man can wake with a wound and think, fine, another door.

But handwriting is different.

Handwriting means somebody was close.

Handwriting means the body held still long enough to be used.

I licked my thumb and rubbed at the name.

Nothing.

I used soap.

Nothing.

I scraped until the skin went bright and stupid.

Nothing.

The wrong name stayed.

DANIAL.

Like the archive had tried to remember me and failed.

Or worse.

Like it remembered exactly enough.

I sat on the edge of the mattress and waited for the room to confess.

Wishing to Spiders for Miracle Nikes / DANIEL SOKEY

No Money to Put Gas in the Mower

No money to put gas in the mower.
City threatening
if the grass isn’t cut lower.
Mama out front
cutting the grass
with a pair of scissors.
Next time,
siphoning gas out the car
just to keep it lower.
Roaches on the walls at night.
Embarrassed
for anyone to come over.
Brother and sisters
always fighting,
always in trouble.
Brother left
cause our mother
got a lover.
Wishing to spiders
for miracle Nikes.
Holes in my cleats.
Mom’s ex
trying to spite me.
Boys all around
wanting to fight me.
Know now
why no one ever liked me.
Cars always broken down.
Mom in her room,
never around.
Found some glory
in a newspaper.
Read my story.
Then all came
to an end.
Been poor all my life,
plus those
that came before me.
Don’t remember many dinners.
Father abandoned,
started his own journey.
They say,
what’s your hurry?
Ten years old,
booked guilty
by jury.
Past eleven years,
an upstanding citizen.
Brother passed.
Grandma passed.
Grandpa passed.
Sick of hearing
my ending story.
Those that deplore me
step on me,
wipe the floor with me.
Every intent
on doing good.
Every intent
on ending
the stalemate.
Some days
better than most.
When it’s bad,
let the sadness
accepting begin.
Bring hope still.
Why I’ve got
dead eyes.

The Things I Can’t Unfeel / DANIEL SOKEY

The Day Labor Office

The meds had worn down by a significant margin by then. Months of partying and lack of sleep had spun together until there was nowhere steady left to stand.

He was thrown onto the streets and pedaled his bike as fast as his legs could manage. Early in the morning, he was put in a truck and dropped off in front of a daily-pay work office. His mind was racing. He pleaded with the driver that he was not feeling right and needed help, but the man did not care. Work was work. A body was a body. A form needed a signature.

The room was full of eager workers, fresh as daisies in the early morning light, trying as hard as they could to provide for their families. He sat there with a familiar face across from him and the feeling that something was already going down.

The paperwork made little sense. He answered wrong. No work for the day. Outside, a man was dragged from the building and placed in front of a police car while officers patted him down. A simple morning turned into warning. The world kept finding ways to say: you are not safe here.

He pedaled with no destination in mind while the illness ate at the fabric of his existence. The night before, lying on the ground watching television, he had seen the screen go in and out until it showed an officer shooting an unarmed man. Maybe it was real. Maybe it was the television. Maybe it was the illness taking what was real and turning the volume until the room could not hold it.

Paranoid as he already was, it did not help.

DUE CLAUSE / DANIEL SOKEY

1. Without Due Clause

Before any person was accused, the room prepared itself to need a defendant.

Without due clause, the charge would surely be dismissed.

That was the first lie written on the paper. Nobody knew who typed it. Nobody admitted carrying it into the room. The page arrived folded twice, warm from a hand that had already disappeared, and was placed in the center of the table like evidence, scripture, lunch money, or a dead bird. The men around it stared down as if the sentence might correct itself.

It did not. Outside, the nation breathed its last breath and called it procedure.

A sigh of relief moved through the gallery. What a ride it had been: three hundred years of symmetry, countless battles, flags raised, flags folded, blades of grass snipped from roots that would no longer bury men into caskets. Everyone had done their part. Everyone had signed something. Everyone had stood in at least one line they did not understand.

The charge remained. It had no number, no victim, no date, no officer name, no statute anyone could find. Still, it held weight. It leaned over the room with the patience of a building waiting to collapse.

“Proceed,” the judge said.

The clerk looked down again. His finger trembled over the page. “Against who?”

It Bothers Me I Have to Act Unbothered / DANIEL SOKEY

It Bothers Me I Have to Act Unbothered

It bothers me I am going to die broke.

It bothers me I never made it.

It bothers me that the people before me died broke too. The R.N. The Korean vet. My mama, who gave us her all. It bothers me I cannot buy her a car. It bothers me I cannot buy my own home. It bothers me I cannot even buy the headphones I want without turning the want into a small private shame.

It bothers me I will not see the world. It bothers me they keep leaving notices on my door. It bothers me I maxed out credit cards and still drive a 2005 in 2025. It bothers me I wear the same clothes. It bothers me there are no dryer hookups. It bothers me I am barely forty and already feel eighty in the bones.

It bothers me I may die in a home. Maybe on the street. It bothers me we act like we do not know each other. It bothers me I may not live long enough to see if my daughter succeeds. It bothers me I cannot catch a break.

It bothers me even my dreams are as shitty as when I am awake.

It bothers me that I am bothered at all.

It bothers me you will pretend you do not relate.

It bothers me I have to act unbothered.

The Last Good Handshake / DANIEL SOKEY

Chapter 1 — The Last Good Handshake

By ten in the morning the courthouse lawn had gone soft under the folding chairs.

The rain had stopped before dawn, leaving the grass dark and pliant, and each new arrival pressed another pair of heels into it. Women from the assessor’s office crossed the lawn with their shoes in their hands. Men who would have called that undignified anywhere else did the same once they saw the mud collecting around the soles of their boots. Bell Crossing was a town that believed dignity meant refusing to be embarrassed by the same thing everybody else was doing.

Elias Finch stood beneath the bare-limbed sycamore at the edge of the crowd with a notebook folded against his palm. He had covered three courthouse renovations, six murder trials, a flood, two factory closures, and enough sheriff’s elections to know that the speeches would begin twenty minutes late and contain the words service, family, and sacrifice in that order. He also knew there were photographs that mattered because of what they showed and photographs that mattered because of what people later wished they had shown.

On the temporary platform, Sheriff Thomas Arlen sat with his hat balanced on one knee. At sixty-eight, Arlen had the compact, weathered look of a man who had spent his life being underestimated by furniture. His dress uniform no longer fit cleanly at the collar. The gold stars sat high and bright against the brown wool, but his hands had aged beyond the uniform. They were veined, broad, and freckled, resting without ceremony on the brim of the hat.

Beside him, Nathan Mercer looked made for a camera.

ALL IN / DANIEL SOKEY

From I — The Charge

I was lucky enough to have a family that cared enough to make me get help even though I thought I was fine. They took the steps necessary even with those hard decisions for me to understand that I was sick and needed help. I was stubborn for a long period of time and in denial and thought they were the crazy ones. It’s hard to put into words with everything that happened. I’m grateful to still be alive today even though some days are harder than most. The stigma surrounding mental illness is not addressed enough. I know there are millions suffering just as I am. My only hope is that they do seek help and give themselves a shot to attempt to live a somewhat normal life and to not live in fear or in the shadows. We’re still human beings and want great things for the world. Not to be pushed aside and silenced. We want to be heard and more understood, because trust us, we barely understand ourselves. Together as one we shall bond.