Free The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe by Joseph Fink

I’m touching your hand right now. No, not that one. Not that one either.
    Do not think you are superior because you have a face and I do not. All of your books are now different books and you did not notice, so who is the lost child in the dark, howling woods of this fable?
    Anyway, I hope you’ll vote for me. One of the books is now my life story, if you’d like to know more about my background. No, not that one. Not that one either. You’ll know it, because my life story is just like yours, starting with calamity and shouting, and ending with an empty room and a to-do list.
    Also Hiram McDaniels has been exchanging e-mails with corn lobbyists looking to elbow in on our local imaginary corn market. Hiram: Bad for our community, bad for our interests, literally a five-headed dragon. Vote for the candidate you can trust. Vote for the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home.
    CECIL: And now a word from our sponsor.
    Today’s broadcast may have been brought to you by uncertainty.
    And now back to our regular programming.
    Ah, we have some sharp listeners. Several of you noted that the strangeness of today does not end with the blinking light up on the mountain, or the mountain itself, but also this vast, muddy plain it rises from. So yes, we are now reporting that there is a great floodplain, strewn with bones, around our city. Its wet patches glint slightly when the blinking light is illuminated. At night, when all distance is darkness, it appears that the universe itself is glimmering red and then gone. Red and then gone. The mud ripples under the footsteps of the approaching, masked army, and this warps the reflections in interesting ways. Carlos says he would like to study it, but that he promised to make a certain person dinner, and he has to learn how to put other things besides science first. Some of this realization might have come with help from those around him. Mayor Pamela Winchell was seen holding her official mayoral bloodstone aloft toward the mountain and the blinking light up on it. She was standing on that plain. The plain that exists now, which we should have mentioned earlier.
    In other news, a man in a tan jacket carrying a deerskin suitcase was seen outside of one of the currently closed subway entrances, passing out flyers explaining the benefits of a mass transit system and encouraging citizens to push for the reopening of the subway as soon as possible. “Transit is the opposite of traffic!” the flyer reportedly said. And “Subway?? More like wowza!” Some citizens reported that the flyer went on to say: “Traverse the naval of the world. That secret, buried point. It is my home. Help me get home. It is already too late to be early, but not too late to be on time.” Here at the station, we can’t confirm any of this, as those holding the flyer soon found that it had vanished from their hands, that they could barely remember their interaction with the man, and that, looking back, all they saw was a haze of dust and heat, distant and indecipherable, like a country they’d never live to visit, like the landscape of a fading dream, like fiction, like fiction.
    All right, we’re really going to get it right this time. We have been focusing too narrowly, and we realize that. As many of you pointed out, we should have spent less time on the blinking light and more time expanding on the bit about the approaching masked army. So: There is now a great, masked army, coming toward us across the bone-covered plain. We have no specific information about them, other than that they look small when far away, and then appear to grow as they come closer, which they are, coming closer. They also might be actually growing. They are quite large now. The blinking light up on the mountain has not changed its pace. There is a noise like growling, only less organic. Like wind hollowing through a canyon, only more . . . growly.
    Ladies and gentlemen, here is