Fiction!

"I feel priviliged to be able to speak to you boy." The old man known as Purburble said to a young girl.
"I'm not a boy..." Kathandra said, the elipses almost visible in her manner of speaking.
"That'll do fine, girl, you have two ears and a wad of sensory computational biomechanics right?"
"You mean my CNS? My brain?" she asked.
"Yes. I'm a story teller, and a fan of science fiction, so I sometimes tend to use... other words."
"Well, yes, go on old man." The light of the fire they sat around danced on their faces like a ballet of luminous faeries, not quite the right frequency to be solid in their dimension.
"And so he did!" a manic smile grew out of his face, his eyes widened and the whole cave seemed to fill with extraterrestrial energy.
"I begin. Again. 'I feel priviliged to be able to speak to you, young lady Kathandra'" he unfurled upon the universe, an attitude and air that seemed as though he was operating at a level above the words themselves.
"I am able to tell you this fable, this timeless legend." he tittered slightly "And by that fact alone I can tell you Truth: I am not one bound by the story I tell." his mania simmered, the cavarn relaxed and the fire itself seemed to subside from what seemed to be a roar. It's crackles came to the forefront of the experience.
"There is an projection, a storyline, a succession of silent bearers that this 'myth' speaks of."
"Like Atlas? The god who holds the world up silently?" Kathadra queried
"YES. Atlas would be a good analogy, but that is such a GROSS example for GROSS times." Puburble ejaculated, the fire flared with his emphasis. "by gross, I mean, base. Low vibration, bass in music too."
He continued after contemplating the thousand associations of base, bass, fish, omega-3s, numbers, the symbols used to represent numbers, synethesia et cetra for an instant, and shivered.
"For these entities, these people, men, women, 'chunks' and 'wholes'... are embued with a secret duty to keep a secret for all of their existence. This secret only they are able to know, not even their creator knows, and REALLY KNOW IT!"
Purumble spat the last two words at Kathandra, his eyes noticably darker as he did so.
Kathandra tensed, which moved her back a few inches and her eyes widened a few millimeters.
"They know this fact, this gnawing thing and they bear it for as long as they can. Some, it drives them visibly insane, others they live in a world of insanity while carrying out the mechanical part of their 'duties' in the universe, fate some call it.
"Some bear their secret with pride, some with perversion, in some it causes illness other than mental. Cancer is a pretty good sign of a bearer, an Atlas as you say."
Kathandra's brow furrowed as she thought how crazy Parumbal was.
"The secret these bearers all hold dear, is vital to the phenomena that we experience here my dear Kathan-durr"
"Kassandra..." she said "Stop making fun old man. This sounds serious."
"OH! It IS serious my deary. My deariest little cupcake tiddly-wink." his eyes widened as he bared his upper teeth.
"And, I'm NOT making fun my sweet. It's just how these things MUST come out, sort of like how a plant must sprout from a seed in a sense.
"We can't seperate ourselves from the natural course of things, one of the things being the way I say your name, Kath-ee"
Her lips pursed and she kept her silence, although her eyes wandered to the night sky just outside the cavern.
"YOU LITTLE WHORE BITCH" Parambler yelped and K grappled her .357 magnum from beside her and jammed it under his jaw.
"Oh fuck" Kassie said as she noticed her arm over the fire and pulled the trigger accidently in a knee jerk reaction to the burning and fumes of her polyester coat.
Retracting her arm quickly as the very confused shell that used to bind Parumba slumped face first into the fire.
"Goddamn fucking dickhole schizoid retard FUCK" she said plainly, allowing a little bit of divinity into her final word, using it as the period of her statement.
Kassandra hated swearing, and she hated killing anything, she was a vegan for Christ's sake. But life on a vagabond track required a loose mentality. She ate a roadkill racoon for dinner earlier tonight, graciously offered to her by Parangled.
She dragged her old friend's corpse out of the fire by his ankles, the cavern was being ravaged by the smell of burning hair, flesh and a potporri of cotton and synthetic fibers used to weave the old man's clothing.
She continued out the oriface into the cool night, illuminated by billions of stars and a moon, waxing and gibbous. Moving about 2 feet at a time, she tugged the meat backwards into the pine forrest. The needle floor of the outdoors helped lubricate the process of Prumbling Paramble out to a place where he wouldn't be stinking up her nose with his decaying process.
At one hundred and thirty two point six standard Kassie tugs the corpse laid to rest. She consciously wiped her brow with the back of her hand and headed back to the temporary encampment. By the time she made it back the breeze had cleared the slight cavern of any odor, not the slight gunmetal tinge of used gunpowder remained. The fire was ruined, only a few embers remained around a peice of wood that had flares that would come in and out of existence with little sounds "poof" "woph". Much more graceful than the screams of a newborn child or the mortally wounded soldier she thought, and had did a double-take in her own head.
"Did I just think that? That feels like something Purumba might've said back when he had a brain-meat..." she thought, a level more objective, to herself. She poured the waste water from inside a coffee can on to the remainder of the fire, which hissed omnidirectionally and plumes of steam rose to meet other gasses in the atmosphere. She laid down on her tattered sleeping mat, staring at her pistol in the moonlight. Waiting for a sleep that didn't ever seem to come.