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I was so close – or were they large? - My eyes conveyed mixed messages to my brain – that I could see the pale light of the waning moon reflected dully off the dark armour that had protected them faithfully over the centuries. The image shining in their beady eyes was that of my own eye, and suddenly, everything focused, and there was nothing left but a trail of inconsequential cockroaches. My brain, however, wouldn’t believe my eyes, and it dawned on me that I had neither eyes nor face. I had no body. The wall and ceiling moved closer and father away, rendering me a giant and a dwarf, all in the same second, as I fought to focus. A cockroach reached the ceiling and fell, landing on my nose, throwing me back into my body, which, I discovered, had been lying cold on the floor. My cheeks flushed as heat returned to them, and my fingers, immobile from the cold, struggled to find movement and heat from the sprawled position I found them from on the floor.
For a moment I sat huddled against the side of my bed, rocking back and forth, staring at the corner of the room and the slowly amassing army. Then, incited by a sudden instinctive fury, I rose and launched myself at the wall, beating and flailing at it madly, subjecting it, and a few passing cockroaches, to all the resentment I harboured against the world. I searched frantically for an opening from which the insects were pouring forth, but found none. It was as though they simply materialised, and I, alone in my world, was subject alone to their mercy. It wasn’t as though they were actually doing anything. All that was happening was a great amassing of purple-black wings and beady eyes. Nothing dangerous – nothing dangerous at all, I kept repeating to myself, in a hushed whisper, immediately drowned by the escalating noise of cockroaches buzzing private musings and clicking against each other. One could go insane from the sound. And that is what I thought – that that is what they must be after – my sanity. They couldn’t do anything else to me. All the power they had would be in preventing me from sleep, from thinking logically. I screamed. I screamed for all the almond bitterness my eyes saw and had seen. I screamed for the lack of a more plausible solution. I screamed and crumpled to the floor in a heap. Meanwhile, the troops hung on my ceiling and wall, chittering at nothing, not having noted my passing, or even my presence at any point. They kept on, keeping at their subtle mechanisms, even as I fizzled into the ground, molten lava through cracks in the ground, taking no notice. They couldn’t hear.
I woke with a start to the loud ringing of my alarm clock. Saturday… Had I even set my alarm? Shivering, I crawled out of bed and performed my usual morning routines, the same customary motions, the same tired face glaring at me through the mirror as I foamed at the mouth brushing my teeth. I needed to get out of my apartment. I needed someone to look at, to see, to talk to. So much isolation, although I was accustomed to it, suddenly left me sweating with fear and had me turning my head swiftly at every sound and starting at the noise of my own breathing.
My psychiatrist was concerned the last time I visited. He said I should be admitted. But they are only taking serious cases. Serious. I’m not a serious case, I told myself. So what if last time I removed a slip of numbered paper from the machine I thought it was an insect and guiltily stuck it in my mouth, so that nobody would know that I produced it. I could buy things when I remembered. I could clean. My home was spotless. Rambling at myself on the street wouldn’t harm anyone. My psychiatrist didn’t think it was his job to take me to the public-pension.
I left my cat lying asleep in the corner, a night of prowl and hunt twitching in her tail. She’d probably returned about four in the morning. I looked at my watch – 8 a.m.
I watched clouds form and linger around my nose. The
I did find somebody in the end. An old beggar woman sat on her own huddled on a bench. I sat beside her, thinking of a way to start a conversation, staring at her. She looked grey and worn, frost covering her back, as if she’d been frozen. Was she? I tried nudging her shoulder, and not resisting, she keeled over and toppled off the bench, revealing drops of blood frozen beneath her nose on her dirty old face. I got up and kept on walking, shuddering from disgust. I was disgusted not at death, not from fear thereof, but at the thought of such loneliness. Such solitude as to slip off the pedestal of life, completely unnoticed, unlamented, and leaving not a grain of sand perturbed. Until now. One granule dislodged itself from the cliff-face and began falling, making a disquieting pilgrimage of my mind.
Nobody would care about the old woman, nobody at all. They would say she was a bum and, well, these things happen, that she had frozen to her death. That’s all her life would amount to in the end – to a black plastic bag, never revealed to the world again. How many, I wondered, had died in a similar manner, slighted by eyes that had scorned their pallid appearance in both death and life? The longer I thought, the more I came to believe that I was simply eluding the evidence plaguing the path so clearly in front of me. No one knew me, of my existence, but for on paper. I mourned my own life alone, weeping in silence, although there would have been no difference had I shared my grievances with the world. Words, like so many autumn leaves, were swept away and trodden on in the silent audience of sullen eyes and drained ears.
Finally, after walking for a while, I came to the town centre, which was just beginning to wake up. On such a persistently brooding day, the morning’s echoes answer the sharp banging of buildings and machinery groggily waking up. The murmur of movement and rustling leaves is whispers ghostly responses. The city puts on an air of being deep in thought. Small juts of rock and wooden boat pegs rise obtrusively from the frozen white water, a long deserted graveyard, its morbid inhabitants spaced far apart to avoid disturbing the deep slumber of their long quiescent neighbours. What a city would have been thinking on such a day was anyone’s guess. It seemed that the water must know, being so close to the city, and having kept company to the land long before the sprawling buildings rose. Perhaps…
Disturbing my reverie abruptly was a collision with a perfect stranger, a man I’d never met. He looked me over, up and down, and I did the same to him. Then we both walked by, not saying a word.
When I reached my home, it was 10:30, and the wind was picking up. I sat down in the kitchen cum dining room of my methodically clean apartment and slipped into subconscious over a cigarette and a cup of coffee and looked out the window into the tops of trees covered in frost. It was cold – so cold – like the echoing halls of my life. Nothing ever came near warming me. Nothing – and nobody – ever made anything right.
From behind I saw the old woman sit down on the park bench. It was a bright sunny day in my kitchen. That’s where the park bench suddenly stood. I had to warn her. I had to tell her not to sit too long, not to sleep, dream, as she would wake up to find herself somewhere darker, somewhere where she simply would cease to be. I rushed around to face her, so that I might look into her eyes and convey to her the urgent nature of my message, but there was no face to talk to. There were no eyes to see, nor ears to listen and not a mouth to reply with. In the place of her face was a swarm of cockroaches, walking in the air where her face should have been, chittering and clicking to signal their triumph over mankind. On her neck was a long gash, as if some monstrous being had attempted to rip it open. My cat, Ganzabil, lay in the corner, chewing with playful energy, on a rubbery eyeball.
I went out again that afternoon, hoping to bump into somebody I knew, but I knew those were fleeting fantasies, as there wasn’t anybody. Nobody had ever wanted to know me. It’s not as though I was unattractive. It just seemed that people shirked from my gaze, my words and my movements. People instinctively detect those that are truly different, and unknowingly avoid them, trying to shield themselves from the dangerous abnormalities of the world. I am like a pallid shadow that the world simply refuses to acknowledge. I grew up in silence, darkness and tears. I am a watery reflection of the lives of others, yet I’m unlike anything they have become accustomed to, a monster in their midst. I never knew why.
“What do you want, Ganzabil?”
“Miaow.”
“Why do you kill, Ganzabil? For pleasure? Who is the king you are selling your soul to? Is he your own passion?”
“Miaow.”
“Where’s your life, Ganzabil? Is all that you are simply lost in an empty jar somewhere, at the back of some filing cabinet? Can your soul be nothing but that of a bloodthirsty murderer Ganzabil? Do you have a body or a soul? Neither? Or both?”
“Miaow.”
It was still cold. The wind was unbearably fast and I stood there under a tree, trying to shelter myself, while leaves and plastic cups swirled and dipped around me. The wind died for a while, and I continued walking on the same path I had taken in the morning. The woman was there, still lying frozen on the park ground. The wind started up again, flanking me from behind, and I dragged her into safety under the bench. Annie – that’s what I’d call the old woman. Annie – the dead old bitch under the park bench. I lay down underneath the bench with her, cradling her still corpse in my arms. She deserved some warmth now, even though she had never had any before. Now it was her turn. Maybe I’d turn out the same. I’d turn out another Annie, dead and cold under a park bench. And who’d notice my passing in the morning?
Suddenly, the sun came out, and the wind died completely. I heaved Annie on to the bench, straining the muscles in my arms, so she could enjoy the sunshine. I stroked the frayed brown arm of her jacket. “That tickles, doesn’t it?” As I walked away, I looked back and thought I saw her smile at me. Or else, it was my own satisfaction at a good deed done.
I didn’t want to end up another Annie. Slipping away unnoticed was depressing. It was unrefined. Or, at least, if not maladroit in practice, was not what I had in mind. I wasn’t the great movie star Mommy had said I could be. I wasn’t the next president, like Daddy fervently wished, either. Fame. All that fame. But I didn’t want to be a failure, either. Somehow, though it seemed unavoidable.
I kept walking, increasing my pace as though trying to leave my thoughts lingering in the air. Once again, I bumped into the man in the city centre. This time, it was behind a clear glass bus stop, which I stumbled and knocked my head on.
A cockroach fell from the clear sky and landed on my nose, as I lay sprawled on the ground. He lit there for a moment before purposefully making his way down from my nose to my mouth, and then onto my tongue. He crawled down my throat, and down into my heart; there he fell asleep.
I woke to find myself laying on the ground, the man kneeling over me. I blinked in the bright sunlight and shivered. It was still cold.
“Are you all right? You’ve been out for about a minute,” he was looking at my forehead. I lifted my hand to the side to feel where a bump had formed to the right of middle of my head.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” my words sounded refreshing to me, even under the circumstances, after what seemed a forever of nobody to talk to.
“You’ve got quite a nasty bump there. Are you in a hurry to get anywhere?”
“No, I haven’t got anywhere to go,” I replied, and the truth seemed sad to me.
“How about a coffee then? There’s a café right here. It’ll make you feel better.”
So we sat, and we talked in the café. He did most of the talking. He must have thought I was still dizzy. I learned about his life, over countless cigarettes, and countless refills of coffee. While he spoke, I nodded occasionally and thought of my own life, something I hadn’t done in a long time.
“Mommy?” There was no reply. “Mommy, where are you?” I ran down the beach as it got darker, darker, and darker, “Mommy…” I sobbed on the ground, clenching fistfuls of sand between angry little fingers. I stood up again. I had to find Mommy. “Mommy, Mommy!” I screamed. “Mommy, don’t leave me!” I shrieked as I ran, tears wetting my smudged face in fear. I ran into a tall man, who grabbed hold of my shoulders and shook me. I looked up – my father.
“Where’s mommy?” I plainly asked.
“Mommy…” a tear formed in the corner of his eye. “Mommy left. She won’t be coming back anymore.” That was the first time I understood that she was gone. Yet, that was a thing that a three year-old-child couldn’t quite grasp. Didn’t Mommy love me? Didn’t she say that she always wanted me?
“How long is forever?”
I picked up my purse and took another cigarette from my pack. I brought the lighter to my face with the cigarette dangling from my lips. There was a sudden silence in his conversation. I lit the cigarette and inhaled.
“Those things will kill you, you know?” He said.
I put out the cigarette, crushing it in the ashtray already overcrowded by some fifteen butts, taking special care to extinguish it completely. He smiled at me and simply said “thank-you.” Nobody had ever told me to put out a cigarette.
“Waiter! Two cups of coffee, please?” He ordered.
“No, thanks, I don’t need another,” I put in hastily.
The waiter looked indecisive “So, that’ll be only one cup then?”
“Yes, thank you.”
After a long pause in the conversation, I said, “I’d better go home now, my cat will be waiting”. I hastily got up, scraping my chair loudly on the floor, throwing a few coins on the table, and left Him sitting there, a surprised expression making its beginnings, as the waiter poured him a cup of coffee.
“I’ll see you around,” He shouted after me.
I went around the park to avoid seeing Annie again. All I wanted to think about was getting home to sleep and rest – but thoughts of Him kept invading my unwilling head. I needed to get home to digest the day’s happenings.
At home, I found the box where I stored all sorts of relics from the past, locked and dusty from not being handled for years. I pulled out a gold bracelet from its little box – just plain with a little clasp at the end.
Sweet sixteen played on the stereo in the living room, but I didn’t want to go to my own party. Not that it was much of a party, but he tried. My father, in other words. My father, and nobody else. I didn’t want anybody, I never did, never anybody but my mother. The music stopped, and footsteps approached my room, as the approached every night. My father sat down on my bed, angry, like he was at night.
“Happy birthday,” he said, and dropped the bracelet on my lap.
“Mommy’s magic bracelet…” I choked.
Mommy used to tell me that the bracelet made all her wishes come true. I guess it was just her lucky charm or something. It scared me – the thought of making dreams come true. Why would anyone want to do such a thing? And now, the sight of that bracelet scared me more than it ever had. I was so close to forgetting. Had it perhaps not been for the reminder, perhaps Mommy would have slipped away gradually. From then on, I clung on to whatever I found of the past, determined to keep Mommy as much a part of my life in death as she was years ago, when her warm smile still loved me. And then I remembered it. Her smile. Unwittingly, my father had opened the gates to a path of determined escapism. From then, he could never again fathom where I had been lost. His nightly anger turned to resignation, as I no longer wept at his thrusts. I chuckled to myself, my motives unclear to my father, who perhaps believed at that moment that he may have brought me out from my reclusive world of tears. Perhaps, I thought, all things considered, it wasn’t such a horrid day after all. It was, in fact, better than most that I remembered in my life. I never cried again.
A book resurfaced somewhere underneath loose pieces of my past.
I looked at my mother’s dead body, cold and uncaring, staring at the ceiling. “Here, Mommy, I picked you some wild flowers. You said you like them and I got them just for you.” They would die, too, just like Mommy, but then I hadn’t really accepted that she could be dead. I knew that she had to come back soon to tuck me into bed again. She’d be back to bake me gingerbread cookies again. She’d return to read me stories. But Mommy never read the rest of Sleeping Beauty to me. My father came in and put the book away, placing it gently on the shelf. Page fourteen – that’s where mother was – fourteen. Why did he put the book away?
I looked further into the box, rummaging through all sorts of memorabilia I’d accumulated over the years – jewellery, mostly, but that didn’t mean much to me, I didn’t really have any memories attached to it. Near the bottom was a big, pink baby bonnet.
“We don’t think she will survive long with that condition. There is nothing to do but take her home,” said a cold voice, faking concern.
Mother sobbed, seeing the little premature runt that I was, even after months in incubation, knowing her firstborn had already died. She took me home and dressed me in puffy clothes that made me look bigger and stronger. She did her best to hide my small size, denying the truth even to herself. She devoted all her time to me, even quitting her job. Nothing mattered more in the world to her than me. Surprising everyone, I survived, but there was always a sad look in her eyes. I remember everything from the first moment I was ever held in Mommy’s arms, clinging to them and valuing them dearly for the scarce moments that they held me, before I was taken away. What stuck most in my mind were her real love, fake smile and melancholy eyes.
I looked at the bonnet, until my grip on it tightened, my knuckles white, and my fingernails drawing blood from my palm. I threw it in the ground, but I couldn’t discard the past like that. It would always be there to haunt me. I picked it up, and rather more civilly, placed it back into the large cardboard box.
Mommy gave birth to a brown cockroach, and then she died. The cockroach slipped through the liquid of the placenta and scuttled away hastily before astonished eyes, avoiding the possibility of being probed into and explored scientifically. It ran away so that nobody would call it the little monster that had killed a woman. It found a convenient little crack in the wall and climbed in. Then, it fell, fell, and fell. With a click, it landed on the back of another cockroach. Now, it was one in a thousand. It was just like the rest of the insects, living underneath a hospital, safe.
I watched Ganzabil stalk a large fly, unmoving but for the clockwork of her twitching tail. Her eyes remained fixed on it as it circled around the room until it landed half a meter from her nose. She pounced, her strong muscles propelling her forward with speed and accuracy. In a moment, the fly was dead. Ganzabil carefully picked up the fly and deposited it on my lap.
“Tick, tick, tick” the clock on the wall spoke to me. It said everything dragged on, and everything tortured my mind. “Tick, tick, tick.” Damn that clock. IT reminded me of the past. Why didn’t Mommy drag on like everything else? Why didn’t she stay in my life? She would have protected me. Why did she leave my tender young flesh an offering? And why the hell did I put that clock on the wall. “Bzzz.” A fly. Even a little fly flew around, not caring about a thing, not giving a damn about his life, and whether he ended up prey to Ganzabil, not about his dead parents who never gave a damn about him. Yet there he was, carefree, while the world’s burdens lay on my lap. There was the fly, like some demented piece of dirt. The next moment he was in my hand, buzzing helplessly; I crushed him. Nobody deserved life if Mommy didn’t. The best should survive. They deserve to – but how come they drop like flies anyway?
I’d often contemplated running a knife down my own throat, into my own stomach. I would sharpen the blade for hours. I would stare at the blade as it slowly sunk into my flesh, then withdraw at the first bead of blood. Why bother. I wasn’t so miserable. I simply wanted attention, but who would notice, anyway?
The next morning Annie was gone. I walked into town through the park again, but the old woman was gone. Who would I talk to now? I didn’t think I’d run into Him again – a thought that filled me with a mixture of both relief and fear – so my life was equally barren as a couple of days earlier.
But I did run into Him again. I saw him sitting at that same bus stop (had I arrived at the same time as a couple days before?). I didn’t talk to Him. He sat at the bus stop, waiting. I stood and stared at his face, so calm and poised, as if nothing in the world mattered. So simple. How the hell could he be so perfectly indifferent, when my own world was a bubbling pot of turmoil and anguish at the mere thought of Him?
When the bus came, I followed Him on, hiding my face in the hood of my jacket from the other passengers, and especially from Him – from that calm, composed man. The bus took me towards the direction of my apartment, and watched as He got off just a stop before mine. I continued on my way home.
He called and I pretended I was still a virgin, crossing myself, and twisting myself for Him…cigarette smoke curled upwards as I watched the ceiling with dull eyes. The pain was the same. I hurt like before. That afternoon I found Ganzabil half-rotten at the bottom of my entranceway closet. How long had she been there? I spent an hour wrapping her up in newspaper. One for each limb, one for the head, and one piece for the torso. The insidious cockroaches wouldn’t find her that way. Rest, rest.
There was a cockroach swimming in the toilet bowl where I had just thrown up. I flushed the toilet and it disappeared. I shivered and rose from where I kneeled, feeling extremely dizzy. Drip. Drip… something fell onto my hand. I looked up at the ceiling, and discovering nothing, touched my face, and realised that it was wet with tears… tears? Why was I crying? I looked at my groggy-eyed, weepy reflection in the mirror. I thought about going back to sleep, back to the comfort of my dreams, but I had already received a jerking start to the day and resolved to simply get up. I figured fresh air would be good… fresh air in the park – it was springtime, after all.
The day was what would have been a perfect one for so many. Already there were sickeningly sweet couples walking in the park, enjoying the tulips poking timidly from the ground, and it was only eight in the morning. Already the teeth of the sun were sinking into the flesh of the morning. To me, the light glared. To me, the light was just hiding the shameful dreams of the night before. I found myself in tears again and walked a few metres to the nearest available bench. The brightness of the day only served to remind me of the several ways I’d wounded myself the previous few months. It seemed as though there was nothing much to live for anymore, and that the hollows of my life, like that of my cheeks, had been eaten from the inside by ravenous insects. As if to prove my point, a mosquito landed on my arm and began to draw into itself what little I had left of my own life. Strange, that to a person it was nothing – the blood – and to an insect, it was the source that kept it alive. How could I begrudge it of so little? I let it draw what it needed. I let it until it took too long, became irritating, and I crushed it with a sharp slap from my hand.
I was sitting in the very same bench I had discovered Annie on. That fact slipped into my conscience as I looked up to see the same tree I had taken refuge under on that cold winter morning. It spun. It danced, it sang with the song of chirruping cockroaches, treacherously reminiscent of the whine of industrial machinery, yet older, far older than the knowledge even of humans. It fell, under the weight of a million non-weights, and the tree crumbled to the cracked cement of the park ground. There were no people. There were eyes. Eyes that could do nothing but stare. Eyes that would never see again, grey with the light of the morning reflecting off the black pavement. I looked down. There was nothing of my body, and my mouth screamed its cancelled existence with a voice heard by none of the other non-ears, heard by none but my own non-thoughts. And my thoughts cried to see my body devour itself, consume itself into nothing but staring eyes.
Shaking my head free of my daydreams, I wrapped myself in my jacket tightly and ran home, where I could get a few more hours of escape in sleep.
“Hey there… erm… I really hate talking to these answering machines, but…” I reached to disconnect my phone. Silence. I didn’t want to hear. I really didn’t want to hear. At some point I must have given Him my number, although I had no recollection of it. With a sigh, I reconnected the phone. It began ringing again almost instantly. I listened… One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Click.
“Um… hey again. There seems to be some sort of problem with your phone line or connection or something. I don’t know if you’ll get these messages, but I’d like to meet you somewhere sometime. If you don’t get this… well, then, I guess I’ll just be bumping into you sometime… yeah… Bye!”
Silence makes the corners of reality blur sometimes, so that all is left is a circle. Silence makes you listen, listen hard for reality and what is beyond. Not beyond the realm of morning drowsiness incomprehensibility, but on the other side, beyond the effects of coffee, into acute awareness of reality, is where silence takes you. Silence blurs the straight lines of society, brings them sharply into clarity at the same time, all the while bearing witness to the ends flowing into each other. Through silence there is a point where fuzzy and focused reality swallow each other and it is here that people listen for the first knocks of what in many cases is labelled insanity.
Hush
Things are quiet, they always are. In the midst of a crowd, the whole world turns into a ringing in my ears. In silence, I tiptoe around my house, as if a sudden noise could shatter my delicate state of mind. There are people everywhere, yet there is nobody around me. Not really. Nobody that I would take note of. Only a few ghosts. The all smile at belly and fall through the cracks in the floor.
The crowd on the streets makes me nauseated. There are strangers everywhere, and there is a clutter of sound in my mind that wants to tidy itself up. Drip. Drip. The sound becomes condensed and rolls of my brows in beads of sweat. The anticipation makes me forget that there are problems that need to be dealt with. It’s no use – I shake my head slowly, my thoughts condensing in an unintelligible mass in the centre of my forehead.
There can be no preparation, only action. The enemy is hidden and the fight is unfair, the scenery around revealing nothing but laughing strangers. “What are you laughing at?” – Ganzabil asks me, the words ring through my head, blocking out anything else. She’s a strangely disjointed Cheshire cat, maggots seething under her fur. And I feel like joining in the laughter, but I wouldn’t be laughing out of joy. The only feeling left is self-loathing and helplessness. A last cry for help from the gods I had just a few days ago thanked for being on my side.
I thought perhaps the gods don’t like being thanked. They prefer to remain unacknowledged, as though recognising their deeds belittles the enormity of their feats – feats that no person could grasp even in a moment of self-perceived enlightenment. The gods are on no-one’s side – thanking them offends them, at the very most, if it even touches them in any way. Perhaps the souls that blunder through life with the best of fortune and the least amount of doubts and dreams are incarnates of the gods themselves. They ask no questions because there are no answers, realising in their sagacity that it is not the other way around. Or perhaps they are the most fortunate of people for not meddling in the affairs of the gods. See no evil, hear no evil.
My happiness had balanced itself on a platter balanced on a tip of a needle. Him. There had been plenty of room to dance around, and to be oblivious to the swaying of the dish, attributing the rocking of the base to the giddiness I felt as I exalted in the cool breeze that blew in my hair from where I stood a few days ago. I felt pleased to know that I had come so far. Now those winds of memory mocked me, serving only to remind me of the joy I had only a few moments ago, it seemed, cherished.
I resolved never to pray again. And never to fall in love again. It seemed the safer bet, even if that wager of belief sometimes proved the more logical. Besides, I wasn’t so sure whether I liked the thought of the middleman hearing my wishes. It seemed much too businesslike for my tastes, and I had the sneaking suspicion that I was selling my soul and buying it back at twice the price in holy water. I would stick to pre-meditation – that, at the very least, would offend no gods – and it would not allow anyone but myself to process my own dreams and hopes.
So what went wrong? My world had seemed in perfect equilibrium, yet it must have been empty, for it had now collapsed in on itself, at least as far as I could tell. That’s how it felt to me, but in reality, it was more like I had been a flesh and blood human being, and woken up to discover that in fact, I was merely a balloon, but to say that there was air inside, would have been charitable. So, a vacuum in slow motion. I already knew I was empty inside. How long until everyone else would figure it out?
I’d stopped having the nightmares. It should have been a positive factor, but now, more than anything, I knew that it was part of what was making me empty. How could I be a truly living being without fears? Fears are what bring into sharp contrast hope. They approach the soul from two frontiers, but their tug of war is waged on the same rope. It is a rope that begins with despair and ends in delight.
I realised then – my soul was gone. How is it that I was still alive? I’d stopped dreaming for three months now. I would speak to nobody now. I’d been ecstatic for a while, I’d found somebody to love, yet it seemed that I only remembered the happy moments, and had no memories of how it ended. Only that I was once – a matter of a few days ago - happy and complete.
tick tick tick tick
tock.
Hush little baby, don’t say a word…
Hush, hush, hush, when you sleep, don’t dream
Momma’s gonna buy you…
She’s gonna buy you…
Buy you a mockingbird
Words choked with jarring tears
They aren’t real, you aren’t here
If that mocking bird don’t sing
Promises, promises
There was a time when you were going to be here
You didn’t show up on time, or you left too early
Maybe I was late. That was it. One lifetime too late
One song. All lives are songs, poetry and people
People with their notations put into a tune
Momma’s going to buy you a diamond ring…
The blood wasn’t mine.
Unreal, fake, hidden in anonymity, for it wasn’t mine
Not really. Nothing is really mine, after all. It flowed.
If that diamond ring
When things ebb and flow, and thrust, they destroy
Turns brass
They renew, and they nourish
Mockingbirds don’t sing. They cry.
Momma’s gonna buy you a looking glass…
Oh, won’t you join me there, momma?
Please sing me that song again. Please don’t let him come up the stairs again.
There were times when you had to hope for home. There were times when the evils of the world were simply insufficient. Then you just had to hope. Not pray. Prayer has been proven futile. Prayer intimidates the gods, who are not almighty. It intimidates those gods that do not wish to think themselves into existence, and thus prayer is untouched by deity. But hope is different. You can dream for miracles, but you can only hope for reality. Hope is expectation without a yearning.
It was on such a morning that I decided to kill Him. Only on such a morning, when the phone rang and the machine didn’t answer, could I have come to such a conclusion. I could wait. I could wait for two weeks, maybe three, and I would no longer receive calls from Him. But I didn’t want to wait. I loathe the watchful face of the clock and the expectation that waiting procures from the mind. It leads to more thought, and inevitably, more destruction and annihilation of former opinions through insecurity. So. No… I was just going to kill him.
I picked up the phone, watched my fingers dial, and listened to the opaque beeping of the phone. I arranged a date, a dinner and walk in the park. I arranged a long kitchen knife in my purse, too. Then I waited. I waited hour upon hour for what I didn’t only long to claim, but deserved to, as well. He hurt me. They both hurt me.
Before leaving, I watched my reflection in the mirror intently. Perfect lips; perfect eyes, perfect… No makeup of course, none, for what was the point of putting myself out of my own misery by the death of another, if he couldn’t see my face to understand what kind of use he was actually being to me? Blue eyes, black hair, always the odd combination… and pale skin, so, so pale.
The reflection wavered, and I was no longer there. And it was dark, so dark, a disturbing contrast to the brightness around me, emanating from the bright lights overhead. But there was nothingness in the mirror. I saw nothing but the absence of light, which began to see out in excited tendrils. It encased me, as if I were a mummy, long dead and revered in a tomb… and I disappeared, leaving behind the hurt. Mommy was in the distance, so beautiful, the only substance in the vacuum of the mirror. Her long tresses seemed to flow, moving in a life of their own, and her eyes were mysteriously dark. She wore nothing, except for dark beads thrown over her pale white body. I ran, closer, closer, hardly sustaining the effort choking on my own tears as I approached my own medusa. I embraced her, sobbing hard for a minute, then drew back to look at her face. There was nothing there but a skull, cockroaches crawling out from her eye sockets and mouth. Her hair flowed, still, like I had seen earlier, but now resembling mould more than the glittering waves they were a moment ago. Her body – nothing was left but a mire of white maggots crawling in and out, at leisure, of rotting flesh. Mommy pulled out an arm, grinning with yellowed skeletal teeth, breaking it off with such force that the bone that was left was jagged and cruel, and plunged it into her own stomach, out of which crawled a maggot, large in size and a sickly yellow in colour.
Mommy opened her mouth and screamed, a piercing, shrill scream, not protested by the ears, but by what soul I had left. I ripped off her head; I ripped off her head, still screaming in the silent void, and with it, I stamped out the life of the maggot, the disgusting worm that had crawled out of her and killed her. Her skull smashed into fragments, so brittle had it become, and the screaming continued, louder and louder, until the piercing sound grew so loud in my mind that I reached a hand to my own neck, nails desperately groping, and punctured a hole in my own throat. I couldn’t help but watch, fascinated, as blood poured down my front, soaking the maggot infested body before me, still standing, with the blood spurting from my veins. I opened my eyes wide, looking up at the ceiling lamp, somehow still there, but no longer possessing of a warm glow, but a distant cold one, much like the moon, and laughed. I laughed, laughed, and laughed, until I realised the sound was not in truth coming from me, for I had no throat any longer, but it filled the air. An amazingly blue eye stared at me from the corner. It was mine.
A gentle pat on my forehead brought my attention to the paw of Ganzabil, moving tentatively about my face, exploring, seeing if I was still conscious. I was sprawled out on the ground, a pool of crimson blood matting my hair. An attempted move from myself, and Ganzabil’s claws were no longer retracted, digging deep into my skull. Where that should have caused pain, I felt none. I attempted moving my legs, but glanced down to notice Him sprawled across my feet. Ganzabil mewed plainly, and was gone. Annie was in the distance, where I could barely see her face, but beyond the stains of blood on her features, I saw her beaming at me, benevolently, and her lips seemed to mouth “pretend, pretend, pretend” over and over again. I turned and was laughing. But laughing brought pain, and the laughing sounded like gasps. I looked down to where my stomach had been gouged out, and where my hand held a knife… like some failed suicide attempt. I hadn’t meant to hurt myself. Ha… haha... Dreams do come true, I thought, and I watched as a timid cockroach climbed onto my shuddering entrails, and in the space of a few seconds, was joined by another. There they stayed, one on top of the other, natures oldest creatures, and didn’t leave, ever.
By Fon Krairiksh
fon @ 11:25 am link to post * *