Etymology: Ground
The word ground stems from the Old English grund, meaning "bottom, base, foundation, surface of the earth," or "an abyss." Its roots trace back to Proto-Germanic *grundus, which is thought to be related to the concept of the floor or the lowest part of something.
Lord at Ground Floor: The Unfortunateness of Being
Open
Lord closed his tired eyes, hoping to outrun the ache in his hips and spine for a few stolen hours. The accruing pain of loss was all too consuming to swallow. His eyes were biologically too confused to know any longer if they stung from the first morning light or from the dread of the all-consuming schadenfreude inherent in human, earthbound nights.
Of course, he remembered happier times, when coexistence was at least acknowledged. But in this world, someone must be sacrificed, and the strongest among them absorb the hostility and envy in weight. Sinking to the bottom of a dark, fathomless abyss—that is how it felt to be alive with principles on American soil. For a time, the trend seemed capable of shifting at the last minute. Yet, in the context of those culminating bills spanning decades, perhaps centuries, the proof was no longer hiding its ugly head; it no longer had even a marginal reason to do so.
This was his last great work: an expression of the direction humanity should have taken. It was not for money or empty notoriety, and not to live long enough to campaign for a false hope—that the system wasn't indeed rigged against him and his son, Quinn. It was a mechanism of monstrous proportionality, and he would no longer deny that to himself. This work was not a call for help or a plea to some ideological god. It was a final, cutting testimony of life, time, and experience within this principality of capitalistic edicts—a record of what hell really and truly smells like at ground floor.
"Ah," Lord thought, "Ground Floor! Now that is a perfect title for whatever days I have left here."
The sidewalk beneath him held the night’s cold like memory—hard, penetrating objective reality, a process of eras in redundancy frozen in time. City Hall loomed nearby, lit just enough to remind him that decisions were always being made somewhere above him. This was his bed—the place here in this capital city of nowhere where a man of principles, and not principalities, reverted in this gridiron game of life.
He licked his lips, tasting dryness, tasting the faint metallic trace of a body pushed too far for too long. Around him, fat, overpaid police officers pedaled taxpayers' bikes in circles all night, their presence less about protection and more about routine. The soft whir of rubber on pavement repeated like a metronome. Overhead, he could hear the buzz of drones coming lower, closer, each bearing the same subthought, outside of time: *Someday soon, those things will be euthanizing the homeless with lasers.
You sign on the dotted line for many things that you hope never come into play. When the youth, job prospects, and monetary prospects dry up, those many arbitrary agreements you signed without fully realizing the cost come due. If you had understood how the system was always rigged against your ability to even harbor a clear, free thought, you would never have signed that non-compete or subscribed to that service. But there you are, in the crumbling rubble the system intended for you—a mocking representation, a scary face missing teeth, grey and shabby. The inner light still feels present, but the eyes are worn, bloodshot, and black. Only now do you fully realize that appearances mean absolutely nothing under this specter of verisimilitude. Turns out, the truth doesn't set you free.
1. "Tracks and Traces
Transition
At first, it didn’t feel like pain. It felt like pressure—sharp, sudden, impossible to place. Then came warmth, spreading too quickly, soaking through fabric, pooling beneath him. His body reacted before his mind could catch up; he was gasping in great, heaving tones as the immediate, daunting alarm turned into guttural shrieks and offbeat, melodic disharmony.
A figure loomed above him, moving erratically, muttering in broken fragments. "I am Cootu... tribe of Kadazi..." The words repeated, rising and falling, as if they belonged to someone else entirely.
Only from that surge of adrenaline—that fight-or-flight response—did every aromatic amino acid in his body begin to jump into rapid sequencing with an instantaneous telomeric response. A blade withdrew from his side. Air rushed in where it shouldn’t. That’s when the pain arrived—deep, crushing, disorienting.
Time fractured. He became aware of something strange: a distance opened, thin but undeniable, as if part of him had stepped back to watch like a scientist—an unattached, quantum observer.
*This is happening to me.*
The realization landed harder than the blade. He had a name. A history. And now, all of it was narrowing to this single point. Cootu moved again, pulling the knife from his ribcage, then driving it into his abdomen. No police, no cars, no one. As Cootu—the king of some damn tribe somewhere, maybe nowhere—began to slice upward with his meaty arms, Lord let out a final, death-menacing groan.
Three minutes passed, seeming like an eternity. He knew this by the not-so-distant town clock striking midnight.
Cootu’s movements slowed. The urgency faded, replaced by something duller—satisfaction, or perhaps just exhaustion. He stepped back. Lord’s vision dimmed at the edges. Blood loss, he thought vaguely. What surprised him was the absence of hatred. He looked at Cootu and felt something closer to recognition than rage. Different paths. Same gravity. A system that stretched people thin until something gave.
Footsteps approached. Slow. Reluctant. Two officers came into view, bicycles at their sides. Their voices cut through the haze, sharp with irritation more than concern.
“Hey—get up. You can’t sleep here.”
A pause.
“...Is that blood?”
The tone shifted, but only slightly.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s blood. I’m calling it in.”
The other one sighed.
“Great. Paperwork.”
Lord tried to respond, but his mouth didn’t cooperate. Above him, the sky remained unchanged. The hum continued. The ground held steady. And somewhere within him, that faint, stubborn flicker persisted—unwilling to name itself, unwilling to disappear, even now.
2. No rebuttal
In reality—if one central stream of truth exists at all—"Cootu" was merely a name, a fantasy made real within the paracosm of a shattered soul, if souls indeed exist. His name was Dwayne Edwards, and even his accent was a smokescreen, an escape from his horrifying, lifelong reality.
Dwayne ran with bare, bloody feet, leaving clear tracks for half a block. He ran into the stinging string of silence, through the midnight corridors of over-arching midtown trees. Ironically, he ran for miles without notice, back to the Masonic Universal Children's Hospital, where that fractured junction point in the annals of childhood had provided the only normalcy he had ever known.
"Chocolate pudding and turkey sandwiches cut in four diagonal pieces. Nurse Anne, she cut the crusts off for me. I’m little Dwayney. That’s me. That’s who I am."
With a pound at his chest, he popped himself into a D.I.D. (Dissociative Identity Disorder) temporary track of normalcy. He entered the doors of that children’s hospital; no one was at the desk as he continued to run up the stairs, up to the ninth floor, to room 223—his room, little Dwayney’s, all those years ago. He grabbed a large adult bathrobe hanging on the outside of a door. He snatched an odd Russian hat hanging atop another rack on the succeeding floor, and he wound about the stairs, making his way up.
Dwayne—or rather, Cootu—did not even realize he was covered in blood, or that he had made tribal streaks across his face, as if he were one of the "true tribal members" he had seen in those movies the old, white, upper-class pervert would play in all their disgusting, derogatory degradation while he violated young Dwayne. But Dwayney was now thirty-four, 265 pounds of schizoid muscle. He was layers of many things, and one of those was a hardened criminal—at least, that was the role society now brandished upon him as the final perpetrator for him to play.
As Dwayne reached the seventh floor, security was there. That was when he grew tired and sweating, and those bright fluorescent lights penetrated and revealed his madness.
"Anne, Nurse Anne," was all Dwayne could muster as the three armed security guards tackled him to the floor.
But Dwayne wouldn't go down without a fight. He head-butted the skinniest one, leaving him on the ground with blood profusely pouring out of his nose. The second one he tackled, linemen-style, throwing him unconscious down an entire half-flight, violently. The third guard was fat and slow, but outweighed Dwayne by a good fifty pounds. He pepper-sprayed Dwayne and then tased him, but this only incited him into a full-blown rage. As he hit the soft, massive man's chest with his skull, full-contact, it was enough to crack the big man's sternum and stop his heart.
By then, nurses and maintenance workers had gathered, telephoned, and radioed from other floors. The hospital and campus police were nearby and on their way, as sirens could soon be heard echoing up the massive, Masonic structure. Suddenly, Dwayne remembered looking out his room window at the fire escape stairs as a child. He ran to the nearest window, and indeed, it opened with ease. He became invisible once again into the night.
However, the building would soon be surrounded. He quickly drifted with momentum down those metal stairs, running with fury and the fear of excitement. As he dropped down seven to ten feet after reaching the final locked portion of the stairs, the grass was wet from sprinklers. He lay there for a moment, laughing with euphoria, looking up at the bright moon and the hospital lights behind him. He had to get to the emergency room; he was existentially wired to return just across the street for his pharmaceutical fix.
Since Lord was at death's door now in the County Hospital, and Dwayne's face was covered in blood as those sprinklers hit—he bent over one as it violently skipped in protest—the blood washed away. He removed all of his wet garments, running to the nearby UC ER in his underwear. He ran through those doors; the orderlies knew exactly what he needed. As four men held him down and one sedated him, he was as close to home as home could be on this godforsaken planet called Earth.
3. Struggles with the Lord: The Convergence
Lord lived in a heaven he hadn't earned. His son was healthy, and the wreckage of his past relationships had either resolved or vanished—a state of sublime, euphoric grace that persisted for years. He did not question it; he simply inhabited it. Then, the collapse came: the violent, molten transition from one dimension to another.
He had been placed in a medically induced coma. What felt like years of an alternate existence was, in reality, two and a half weeks of purgatory. When the doctors finally signaled his waking, the veil lifted. He was informed of the organizations and state funds that had bankrolled his intensive care. He was also presented with the bill of his own anatomy: a damaged liver, compromised lungs, and a new, fragile heart condition. He would have housing for the first time in eighteen years, but the cost—physical and existential—was exorbitant.
The ironies, however, were just beginning. By way of default, cost-reduction, or a dark metaphysical gravity, the players in this unfolding tragedy had all been funneled into the same county hospital.
Dwayne, Edel, Marcus, and Elon—the guards Dwayne had dismantled in his fury—were all under the same roof. None of them could remember the face of their attacker, yet they were bound by the shared trauma of that night. In a final, twisted turn of fate, the very physician who oversaw the unit was Dr. Michael Stevenson—the son of the same man who had molested Dwayne all those years ago at Shriners.
The paths were converging.
Lord was prepared for discharge, handed a rigorous, soul-dulling pharmaceutical regimen, even as his kidneys began their final, failing protests. Dwayne remained confined, a straightjacketed force of nature in a padded cell, awaiting a physical examination by the only acting doctor available: Stevenson. Marcus, the big man, lay heavily sedated, his heart having been breached by his own ribcage during the chaos. Edel was held in traction, his spine and hip shattered.
They were all under the observation of Dr. Stevenson. They were all drifting toward the same intersection. As these disparate lives were forced into the orbit of a single chief physician, their stories began to bleed into one another, coalescing into a Grand Unified Nightmare—a manifestation of the "Ground Floor" that none of them could have imagined, yet all of them were destined to inhabit.
-----
Lord at Ground Floor: The Unfortunate Architecture of Existence
Lord closed his tired eyes, trying to outrun the ache of a life spent holding onto principles in a gridiron game of capitalistic edicts. He was a man who had seen the truth of the system, recognizing that for some to survive, others had to be sacrificed. His final work was not a plea for salvation, but a cutting testimony of the hell found at the ground floor of American society, a place where individuals are merely variables in a machine of monstrous proportionality.
The characters are trapped in a feedback loop where every rational survival action is a brick in their own prison. Lord, broken by the accruing pain of loss, inadvertently destroyed the life of Dr. Michael Stevenson, sparking the chain of trauma that bound them all. Dwayne Edwards, a 265-pound vessel of schizoid muscle and repressed history, was branded a hardened criminal by a society that required a monster to justify its own brutality. In his fracturing, he became Cootu, a tribal persona that allowed him to weaponize his suffering.
The guards, Marcus, Edel, and Elon, were not merely victims of Dwayne’s fury; they were active conduits of an institutionalized molestation ring, feeding on the very degradation they were sworn to police. Dr. Stevenson, the son of the primary abuser, unknowingly inherited his father's role of overseer, tasked with managing the victims his lineage helped create under the guise of medical authority. They were all complicit in a machine of abuse, normal people in a broken world fulfilling pre-scripted criminal roles within a systemic prison.
These characters were never truly themselves; they were biological conduits for a trans-generational plague. When Lord asked, What is the final message that I have to learn, oh God, the answer from the Jester was the ultimate punchline: To become utterly numb by design. This was not a moment of peace, but an act of total erasure. When they realized their rebellion was merely a calculated variable in the system feedback loop, they lost their narrative. Their violence, their criminal complicity, and their eventual deaths became statistical necessities for the system maintenance, not tragic acts of agency.
The convergence at the County Hospital was not an accident; it was an existential terminal. As Marcus lay with a breached heart caused by his own ribcage during the chaos, Edel lay in traction with a shattered spine, and Dwayne remained confined in a straightjacketed rage, they were all funneled into the orbit of Stevenson, the physician tasked with examining the carnage.
The massacre was not an act of rebellion; it was a systemic purge, a reset button clearing the stage for the next performance. The cold, mechanical silence that follows is the sound of the Jester moving on. There is no catharsis. There is only a void where human potential once stood. The infectious, trans-generational plague of trauma is not destroyed; it is merely archived, waiting to be uploaded into the next generation of broken souls. The loop remains unbroken, and the machine, having achieved perfect, numb equilibrium, simply resets for the next iteration of the joke.
Term: Latin *terminus*, meaning "end, boundary, or limit."
| Term | Original Generic Root | Meaning |
| Ground | Proto-Germanic *grundus | Bottom, base, foundation |
| System | Greek *systema* | Whole compounded of several parts |
| Trauma | Greek *trauma* | Wound or injury |
| Cycle | Greek *kyklos* | Circle or wheel |
| Architecture | Greek *arkhitekton* | Chief builder or master mason |
| Capital | Latin *capitalis* | Of the head (capital wealth) |
| Edict | Latin *edictum* | A proclamation or decree |
| Schadenfreude | German *schaden + freude* | Harm-joy (joy in others' pain) |
| Purgatory | Latin *purgare* | To cleanse or purify |
| Mechanism | Greek *mekhane* | Tool, machine, or device |
| Identity | Latin *identitas* | Same-ness |
| Metaphysical | Greek *meta + physika* | After/beyond physics |
| Proportion | Latin *proportio* | Comparative relation |
| Variable | Latin *variabilis* | That which changes |
| Equilibrium | Latin *aequilibris* | Even balance |
| Void | Latin *vocivus* | Empty or vacant |
