How Are We To Survive? - A Short "Story"

 

How Are We To Survive?

     I couldn’t believe how much light still reflected off his bruised, swollen-shut eyes. Twinkling pale orange light radiated through the dark, vibrant hues of purples and blues that shrouded what was once his eyelids. If I got close enough to him, I could make out an infinitesimal reflection of myself, as if I was staring into tiny puddles of oil slicks. All the while, bits of his flesh flicked between my clicking, venomous tongue 

Just for a wandering, fading flicker of a moment, I felt so intensely close to him. As if our flesh was inseparably entangled and my heart operated from within the mechanical patterns of his blood sputtering from the wounds I gifted him. What a brief, and strange, moment it was. Our vision conjoined. Then, as abruptly as it happened, it exploded back apart. I looked back to myself, reeled the world forcibly back into hideous focus, and saw clearly once again. It was then that I remembered just how much I absolutely loathe him - or at least whatever remained of him that was weeping and taunting me in the mirror. The way his face retracts and reveals all the widening craters making up the greasy pores of his graying, off-color flesh. The crooked tilt of his bloated, obnoxious nose - tipped with vile little spider legs curling out of each of his nostrils. His dry, cracked lips, the unattractive sag in his jowls-to-be, that rotten orange peel of a scowling mouth, and his beady, sallow, colorless eyes shrinking behind shattered glasses. Of which, I broke into his face when I took his noxiously fat head by his frizzy, uneven clumps of sewage-colored hair and smashed him into my reflection. 

It’s pointless to try to explain any of this to you. My special little plan and all of its spiraling permutations, what I have in store for the two of us. Oh, what it will be to become nothing. To become more than the sum of all of our inflamed, eternal nothings. To transcend this horrifically useless flesh and become something altogether noncategorical. Your potential is undulating in incompetence and insignificance without my measured degrees of torturous reform. 

 Protest all you want, force more tears out from the narrow, glass-embedded cuts underneath your eyelids, resist me with all the meager, pathetic strength you can muster; 

Whatever you do… 

This beating will never end. 

-

Sooner or later, something began to change. 

An uncanniness set into his glassy visage, a silvery slipstream of radical possession that took root in the ultimate depths of his faltering humanity. Like a sentient infection, it spread through him and erased anything recognizable for life; sinking into the strange and unreal. An inhuman mockery stared back at me with an unfathomable emptiness radiating from his eyes. An unexpected unraveling of his form, maybe this was my goal all along. 

His face started to morph into something truly magnificent. For the first time, after meticulous modifications and mutilations, he was becoming a sight that I could not only finally stomach to look at, but also deeply admire. A strange sense of jealousy started to invade my thoughts; I knew that this was a wholly unique transformation I guided this once minuscule worm through, never to be replicated. Even if I were to painstakingly recreate every single last laceration and mutilation onto myself, it wouldn’t be the same. No, I was alone now in my existence. My reprehensible human body rooted firmly in reality, firmly in the shallow pool of unremarkable normality we are all wading through. All the while, this once insignificant reeking rodent of a man before me is in an enviable status of unpredictable metamorphosis. I knew what I had to do - there was only the option to push this even further than once planned, to get to the point where his change becomes so radical, so absolute, so far beyond what I, or anyone else, could imagine, that it bleeds into my existence and permanently alters all that I know to be real. To push him to the limit of the darkest chambers of my imagination, I’ll see him as the key to redefining trauma and degeneration. 

 Once more, I grabbed hold of this shifting mystery of amazement and pain I once falsely called my victim and slammed him hard against the mirror. The collision of which felt as if it momentarily killed me, like a sudden bolt of lightning hurled at me from God. And in that moment, my reflection melded into him. His face splintered open, lined with perfectly manicured shards of glass, with new wounds exploding in a pained brilliance. Out of his back, through the smears of blood and saliva pockmarking the now-cracked mirror, I saw spindly, anemic, and black wings burst and unfold out of his back. They were featherless, just merely outlines of what should be there. Like burnt and fragile tree branches, or the broken limbs of a marionette, they stuck out of him in an unnatural intimidation; all crooked and serrated, almost perfectly framing his metamorphosis. As they grew, as he gritted his teeth nearly to dust, as his entire body shined in a dark phantasmagoric light show of induced agony, my frenzy grew and grew…along with a newfound fright and sudden unwanted reminders of who I am. 

The barren, demonic wings continued to extend and pull me closer into the darkened framework cocoon it was forming. All the while, the sounds of his flesh rending, blood and spinal fluids oozing, and bones twisting in impossible angles all rang out and surged in an utterly disgusting sluicing symphony. It was all wrong. It has all gone so horribly wrong. The sharpened edges dug into me, plucking away at my framework like elongated, necrotic fingers banging away at broken piano keys. Before too long, I could no longer tell where I ended and the subject of my violent experimentations of hatred began. And with each passing second bringing me closer and closer to the core of this thing beside me, the more uselessly tormenting memories exploded in my spinning head. I couldn’t escape it now, I was drowning, going under every single recollection of what brought me here, who my newly winged victim was, and why my hatred for him eclipsed any other pain imaginable. 

I had no choice but to face the manifesting memories head-on, as the space we were in continued to close in and populate the atmosphere with tar-black thorny scions and limbs all grafted onto each other in a chaotic bramble. I remembered all that he did to me. All the moments lost away and wasted by his influence. All the radical self-hatred and nihilistic ruminations he plagued my mind with. The lens of my reality that he permanently distorted, cracked, and pierced my brain with. All the countless nightmares he whispered into me adding to the disintegration of my mind and the sleep he would, night after night, deprive me of. All the moments when he refused to leave my side until the weight of his existence unnaturally mingled with mine drove me to drastic, haphazard, impulsive actions against myself. All the days he made me toil away in spiraling, ensnaring thoughts about ways to end my life, and how he so easily convinced me that death was all that I ever deserved. The relationships he slaughtered, the opportunities he squandered, and all the nights he watched me with unbroken intensity as I tried…and failed to die. 

And now look at what I’ve done to him. I’ve made him all too real. I’ve validated every single assault, every aspect of corruption, he committed towards me. And, worse yet, I’ve turned back towards him in this manifested state and channeled it all back to him. The monster of my design, now transmuting into something inconceivably more destructive, possessive, and absolute in its control over me. And it was all my fault. 

My flesh was pierced all over, weaved in and out like a fractured and abused piece of embroidery were the wings, twigs, limbs, tendrils, whatever, of my obscene, inhuman shadow. Everything was dissolving as my panic and guilt became insurmountable. What was to become of him after all that I’ve done? And what of me in its wake? Whatever may come, I knew I deserved it. But the pain wouldn’t cease, and with it came a newfound adrenaline. Mixed with the panic and the claustrophobic limitations of my current existence, I suddenly knew what I had to do.  

With great waves of agony, I forced myself forward towards the mirror and lunged for a brand-new razor blade that was perched atop the sink. Once more, I grabbed his head, was gifted several swirling stigmatas from the sharpened edges of his transforming exterior, and slammed him into the glass. His eyes exploded with a pained brilliance as I suffered through the continued torture and unsheathed the razor blade. I had to finish the transformation, I had to allow him to become something beyond me. And even if it were to kill me, at least I’d be set free. Sliding the blade across his gray, sallow cheeks, I felt an exuberant pain spread ablaze through me. The panic and the guilt descended, and a maniacal, contemptible death wish ascended in its wake. All illogical, wavery, and hopefully fatal. I dug in with the blade deeper and deeper, battling against the taut resistance of the thick layers of flesh. Eventually, I felt the metal slice through his gums and hit what must have been the edge of his jawbone. Finally, he screamed once more. His screams vibrated and seemed to wriggle my tongue and rattle my teeth. 

Again. And again. And once more I excavated his hideous face until four gaping gashes lined each side of his mouth, running up his cheeks, splitting open his eyes, and forming wounds that were almost like effectively breathing gills. His appearance finally entered into the truly uncanny and was no doubt incapable of reforming into anything even closely resembling a human. The wings released me, shriveled up, and died across his back - leaving black lightning bolts, or highly diseased varicose veins, up and down him. They shined out of the sheets of blood rushing over his “body.” Finally, I fell to the ground in the mire of mutilated remains and watched as the light left us and he evaporated slowly into dust. Before it all went black, I felt the unexpected warmth of the sun and heard sirens in the distance closing in on me. Now, I can finally sleep. 

-

The sleep was supposed to be eternal. But the sirens picked me up, they carried me through the bisected ruins of the empty world I’ve been unfairly placed into, and confined me in an austere little hospital that might as well be perched at the end of time. In my confined cell, there were no mirrors, hard surfaces, no sense of time. No longer could I see, no longer could I speak out, all I could do was tremble in the unquiet cacophonies in my head. Occasionally I would raise one of my heavily scarred and reconstructed hands to run against my face in an attempt to remember who I was, what I looked like, and ground myself in the pull of reality. But all that I could ever feel was unfamiliar.Lumpy parallel keloids lining my face in crazed, uneven slashes. Strange little bolts holding together my jaw. And heavy cottony clouds covering up the tiny shriveled-up wounds I had for eyes. An incomplete transformation lost in a captive wilderness of total isolation and darkness. And that’s where I will remain. 

And despite it all, despite me thinking that the sirens picked you up too and saved your detestable maggot of a self, I could not sense you anymore. No matter where I was in the world, I always felt you with me, I always felt the inevitable descension of your attacks on me. But no longer. Somehow, I survived you. And now whatever you could call the state I’m in and the infinity I am made subject to, is all that will ever remain. 

Was it really worth the struggle, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness, the wasted years lost in self-hatred and inwardly directed violence, the loss of my far more powerful second half, and the inhabitation of this utterly dismantled and ruined husk I am now trapped in? Was it really worth surviving it all when this is all that is left and all that will ever remain?