V.V. Saichek writes of mental fantasies and how these passion plays effect and transform our daily practices and our view of the world. As a psychotherapist and writer, she developed the term Fictionation to explain how (internal dialogue,) story telling, sustains or distorts personal reality. The fictionalized tales we tell ourselves reflect our hopes, fears and desires, not necessarily what is, and form our very personalized existence. They help us sustain the “If” within life. This birthing of alternative self-perceptions, or “false”-selves is Fictionation in action. Ms. Saichek explores this up-ended, madly creative, continuous reworking of reality as a model in developing character and crafting stories with strange, dream-bound resonance.
Art (January 20, 2012. Issue 34.)
Last One Standing
Mombo Promise
Inside the Rain
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Angel Walking
Bloodlines (November, 2011. Issue 33.)
Aloren, a five foot eight and loose-limbed unisex bombshell; dropdead and all that, red of hair, lustrous of skin now gone pale, down and drawn and cancelled out of the largess of what was a beautiful, if thirty-five, piece of ass, and damn, damn, damn, getting no sleep as of late and jittery for no reason yet so very tired, tired, tired – to the depths of her, tired.
Her body is in revolt. Her head is on fire and her stomach, tied into double and triple knots, into lakes full of acid, erupts and flings its goo against her pinkish 
walls. It tells her of impending things. She wishes she could blink her eyes and make these nasty sensations go away or at least get somehow, some help, from the blank medicine cabinet, but no, she, it, is empty of all remedies. Her day has just begun and she hasn't even downed the crust of a bagel.
Her insides are burning with knowledge and the results of last night's fish sandwich. Indigestion courses through her (upsetting her fine constitution,) and she feels blood racing away from her core, chilling the tips of her fingers, making her pale face even paler. Her blood continues to take flight, pulling heat with it . . . and the pressure is pushed elsewhere.
She sees the veins in her hands pulse with incoming and outgoing tides, of data streams written in liquid red and soon her body is singing, its blood having its way with her. The canals of life, artery to vein, vein to capillary, race onward carrying messages of great import. The rush and tumult is too much. Pressure is building. Her head is filled and lights are flashing – warning – warning – incoming . . .
A wisp of a vein bursts behind her eyes. Her brain is engorged with a thousand lights. Her mind is full of fissures. She tears the bristles out of the hard acrylic flat of her hairbrush as her hands and body dance, contort in convulsions, curl in collusion and she loses the thread – all threads. They break apart and fractured filaments force themselves down new channels, digging trenches into the rudderless rose of her collapsing brain. Lesser and lesser, or greater and greater trajectories erupt and definitions of things unspool, their strands distanced and dislocated . . . destroyed.
She can see the broken strings of "things." Some are teacups and ponies, yesterday's jumpsuit and tomorrow's telecommute. Riffs of what was sings down lost pathways. She attempts to untangle the mire but she can only resurrect the most menial of mental images, without names to label what is. Roots and shoots, tubers and tendrils - stones cracking, whack, whack, within her head, like the vessel that popped off, translate into fissures venting pent-up steam - hot gasses from unknown zones burst through ocean sea river floors and flood the remaining twists and turns of her tender flesh. Oxygen also floods the system. She can feel gusts and blusters. Nameless winds brush memory down and away into cubbies/corners never accessed. The tiny tears are bleeding her of who and what and all of her wherewithal.
Pressurized air batters her brain stem and circles higher - rat a tat a tat - a Kalashnikov on steroids popping blasting obliterating wholes into holes. The corpus collosum collapses. Already in two factions, its duty to ferry information from right to left to right, to translate data from impulse - from thinking to sensation to mental image is slowed to the rate of molten iron and now pulsing fire devours what is left of her and her hands reach out. She cannot feel her hands.
Her hands reach out and there is odd information at the ready. Strange information. Incalculable information, much too grand to accept . . . and yet.
She knows she is touching vast fault-lines. She feels gigantic tectonic plates shift and ripple. A cat-o-nine tail of electrical impulse curls from the flick, and click click click - her spine clacks and clatters in strange alignment. In what remains of her mind's inner eye, she has become very large. She is outside in. Her scattered senses knock together as she pierces through layers of time. Not her time, no. She is covered in eons. The pores of her skin metamorph into continents – oceans – mountains - that range beyond reckoning. Stars fall into her hands.
She is following some blind event horizon that is following her; wherein she is the center. Time is shaking, breaking apart, as are all things of substance – unless, her fingers locate the recalcitrant and juddering core; trace the clatter to that which first shifted – the myriad, combative tectonic plates that surface the world, like the cataclysmic veins in her splitting head– if she can pinch and push and douse the fires of . . . the fires of falling apart . . . well, then. What if?
She feels around for the fault-lines rumbling, roaring, crushing her bones into mulch. Within her, without her, plateaus and plains and valleys do battle to the death in thrilling supersonic collisions. She stretches her lengthy rubberwoman arms past the savannahs of Zimbubueland, tipping the edges of continents. Her toes know what to do. They curl around coastlines and her hands grip the lost mountain ranges of Knuptwup in a delicate double-handshake. She separates masses that have cantilevered over and under during the battle of the senses, having made quite a mess of a nice twist of brain. Her stomach begins to settle.
She stretches a column of land, tearing roots and shoots and releases the pressure of trapped blood within her. The level of the sea aligns with her dropping blood pressure - it nips down an inch or five and the flooded shores and lost coasts rise up. The skeletons of a thousand, thousand broken structures also rise up - the twisted rebar of buildings; houses churches office parks playgrounds dance halls and taverns, condominiums with outrageous maintenance fees sea-side resorts fitted out with individual cabanas trusty reedy paths, avenues, lanes, hillocks and brambles, weeping willows resurrected so they may weep once more and roads and roads and roads that had collapsed and crumbled begin to refine and realign as blood finds a way to flow around and through the tumbled mountain of burst dreams.
Her fingers stretch and she reaches to pat each hair in place. The continents settle under her touch. Rivers have found new passage and begin to seep into new soil.
Night falls. It is time for the stars. The stars in her eyes close and all the lost things from here and there gather. They whisper to themselves, goodnight.