Sickening

Stress lines, sunken eyes, walking corpse surrounded by flies buzzing around a quiet library where nothing can be heard, but the sound of clacking keyboards; he sits hunched over his work he will not do until there is no other choice. The buzzing can’t be heard by any but one, that same auditory plague that he will never shake but learn to live with.

His desolate stare could stop a semi-truck well over its governor, but that same hollow lack of feeling keeps him stagnant. That barren, broken record of a brain spins on the record player, never ceasing to imitate what it once was, yet each attempt further estranges itself from the truth.

Broken records can never be fully restored, more so a reminder to himself of what he has truly become.

He occasionally makes attempts to work in the library, go to classes, and socialize like the others, but there exists a barrier that goes beyond languages. These humanoid animals that roam among his institution live reactively, staying familiar and never reaching past what they already comprehend. Rather counterintuitive for university students, but the hypocrisy is mutual when a man can never reach past his primal nature.

Veterans may have the 1000-yard stare, but he can see the back of his head from the other side of the globe, and the scars that run down his back. You know you’re tired when it takes more energy to be asleep than awake. Scatterbrained as always, yet hyper-focused when it counts, as if it all fell away and led him to a world full of himself.

He is seeing what’s in front of him, but at the same time, he is in his mind, accessing his visuospatial plane as if he is reactively sleeping with his eyes open. That same sleep consists of the same old dream, and it goes a little something like this:

***

October 31st, 2014, the boy who lives on the Day of the Dead begins a two block journey home.

The ninja-costume-clad child fears naught, as the dark could not possibly hold anything more scary than what lives beneath his flesh. However, a so-called oracle of the dark still cannot predict the unknown which calls said darkness its home.

This unknown entity is scarcely recognized by younger residents of the neighborhood, to each their name a representation of said entity, however to this boy, he will forever remain nameless. He lurks in the bushes among the stomping grounds of innocent children, quite similar to the prey he stalks, but something is different about him.

Maybe it’s the stench of internalized depression, leaking through every pore of his unwashed scalp, layers above a brain that can’t understand his parents’ abusive actions towards him. This lurking man longs to append his existence to this false reality, and in a feral fit of ferocity, he falls victim to circumstance.

One could never foresee that man in the bush but the entity which forged him; clad with a purge mask straight from the depths of the damned and demented, slams one foot far in front of the other and begins his pursuit.

This hypervigilant excuse for a man sniffed the substance that long plagued West Virginia before taking off, and as it pushed into the ends of his disfigured body, he was seen by the boy,

That bush the boy knew as the secret base for kids at the park, now tainted by the scent of lust and guilty pleasure, was left alone as the man pursued his only witness.

At the ceiling of a 13-year-old human’s speed, he runs for home base, however, he will not come in safe, not this time anyway. The man tackles the boy onto the coarse and unforgiving sidewalk and pins him down by the wrists.

They say the eyes are the windows of the soul, and as the boy opens his eyes to confront the foe at hand, his soul is met with a one-way mirror of a gaze. The boy knew whatever lies beyond those pupils was something better left untouched.

The entity produces a hunting knife from his back pocket and begins slowly slicing the boy’s left index finger, right at the knuckle nearest to the palm, as he explains what will happen if anyone ever hears of his encounter.

The boy knows he’s sure to lose a finger or two at this rate, but how could he hope to reason with someone seemingly devoid of humanity? As he begins to slice that left index finger at the root of the knuckle, like a seasoned cannibalistic butcher, the boy of genius-level intelligence thinks of the one chance he has to live.

He harbors his own life and lets go, leaving every trace of civil conditioning behind in a fit of primal rage. The boy reactively bites down the hand that grips the knife, tasting that salty, forbidden fluid mixed with that rancid substance like a wild, feral animal.

The man lets out a banshee-like shriek, and the boy, now equipped with the very blade that once threatened his life, takes a defensive stance. Before he could begin to back away toward his home, just tens of feet away, the man lunged at his opposition that was once recognized as prey.

The smaller, pre-pubescent boy weaves under the hands that reach for him, and with knife in hand thrust through all 7 layers of flesh smoother than leather, directly into the under-meat of the man’s right leg. The boy does not twist, he pulls out before he makes a grave mistake, proactively with initiative.

The man is rudely welcomed back to a sober reality, and a leg loses both scarlet red blood, and yellowed fat despite his skinny, decrepit build. He begs not for his life, this entity makes the boy aware of his character’s worth, he instead begs for one more hit before he departs from this life. God knows what is in that bush, but who knows if the boy’s home will remain safe after leaving this man alone, all he knows is to keep in range and get rid of the one thing standing between him and his only safe place.

The boy walks to his old secret base, his favorite hiding spot, and the place where he would soon forge his own true nature. He watches the man limp into the bush, and as he turns the corner loosely defined by dead, leafless ends, he watched the crystals as they were sucked like a vacuum up the man’s nose, and fly through his body like a magic prison bus, keeping his life at a ceiling with nowhere to go but farther down.

Perhaps what happens next could be called liberation, because one could ask how something as vile as this creature could have a chance at heaven, however could anyone else need the feel of divine love more than this man? Perhaps it’s a safety mechanism, the boy’s brain and the God he once believed in are both beyond his comprehension.

Upon collecting himself after the dose, the man meets eyes with the boy, but more than anything, he meets souls with the boy. The boy sees into the man’s eyes, and for once the windows are not boarded up, tinted, or opaque, the man’s soul shines through like a drop of oil lit in a cave flooded with freshwater. This “entity” locks souls with the boy, and for a moment, everything feels as if it could go on normally.

Nonetheless, the man recognizes what he has created inside this little boy. He has felt the lustful sensation of bloody penetration, and more importantly, the feeling of control over his fate. Like a hunter trapped in the moment, engulfed with the sickness of buck fever, the boy knows there are only two ways this situation ends, one must stay and one must go.

The man accepts his fate along with the consequences of his actions under the influence, and falls to his knees. Before his departure, the man tells the boy of a way he could go on living just the way it was before. He points to a needle filled with some sort of fluid and tells the boy to use it in his arm after doing the deed, and he’ll forget it ever happened.

The boy knows full well he’s too young to do this, but at least in this sense he will be conscious of what he is doing, yet give up being conscious for the rest of his life, or at least that is what he was told.

The boy does the honors, slicing and at the same time bursting the life pipe that retains his own life, and freeing his dirty, foul soul to be cleansed in another life. The man upstairs shall not reject those plagued by mortal illnesses or coincidental faults, or perhaps that was wishful thinking for the boy at that moment

The boy could feel the man’s hands no longer grasping his wrists, but holding his hand, guiding him towards the one way he could escape true reality and forget, thereby saving the boy from himself. The needle, filled with a sort of umbilical residue now ties him to that entity, once and for all.

The boy left his innocence on the sidewalk corner, at this point he knows he’s in too deep yet a rope has somehow been thrown to him. Why wouldn’t he climb it, what more does he have to lose?

The needle hits the skin of his right elbow, probably in the one place it shouldn’t have gone, and his life immediately fades away right before his eyes. Man ascended to the level of the Gods, yet descended below the level of the man who started it all.

He absent-mindedly unlocks the front door and begins to wash his hands like a good little boy, and he falls asleep just a bit after his bedtime. It’s Halloween after all, he can break the rules and have a little fun on holidays.

The news blared on the television the following morning, and it spoke of a man who committed suicide in that bush, but how would the boy know what happened after the decision the boy made?

***

Somewhere between 10th grade and now as a junior in college, it has all come back to him, and he has realized the lie that he was fed by a dying man’s words.

He always has a blank face when confronted with any sort of adrenaline, yet granted a sickening, twisted high from any sort of physical fighting. However, nothing will ever compare to that night.

That man who was once a boy never knew until March 31st, 2023, in full the events that unfolded, the story of the attacker and the victim, the traumatizer and the traumatized, but how should he know the difference at this point?

The gift that keeps on giving, the more he remembers the more it all makes sense to him, and the more he realizes who he was meant to be versus what he turned out to be.
Forever sickened, and yet forever loved. Forever plagued, yet forever healed. Forever vigilant, yet forever absent-minded. Forever living proactive, yet always reactive when it matters most. Is he a God, an animal, or somewhere in between? Only time will tell.

Credit: isaac skellington

YouTube