[Suzerain of Sheol]

Okay... don't know how long it's been since I posted something here, but I am now, so here it goes. :p

I wrote this a few weeks ago out of sudden inspiration (a very rare occurrence for me). It's half-serious and half-satirical, poking fun at a certain... zeitgeist that I happen to at least partially inhabit.

I love comments. :)

Diegesis

I live in the dead now, one of those transcendents like love that dies the instant you speak it, that you smother when you decide to embrace it. This is the human relationship with the sublime. This is how we relate to the universe itself. Then we look up like a bewildered child from the shattered pieces, the limp corpse, and wail that it isn't fair, that it wasn't our fault. Just give us one more chance. Bring it back. Makes things the way they were, just like we remember, back in those days before we murdered the world with good intentions. Of course, the irony is, those good intentions were supposed to be good for us, but us is another one of those beautiful abstracts that we humans have a tendency to rape to death, but only while we're begging it to make everything okay, take the fear of the dark away, numb the pain with an oblivion of claustrophobic belonging. It doesn't quite work that way.

The paramedics arrived half an hour ago, announcing themselves with strobing red and blue light screaming through my window like a whirlwind of delusion and reality: people's passive expectation of blood and the ugly carmine truth when it starts spattering everywhere. Yes, blood. She was throwing it up all over. The stairs look like someone got beheaded on the top step then tumbled down. A little trail at first, then deep, hideous splashes soaking into the 30-year-old berber.

Funny how he gave up on Jesus so fast, went rushing for his cell to summon sinners as if the EMTs were earthbound angels who still remembered how to heal. And the Lord of Hosts sits there waiting in a locker at the church, rolled up in wrinkly, smoke-stained vestments, closed away in an old effaced Gospel, no use to anyone. Christ is really just a meme, an illusion every bit as convincing as money, another statement in the ether wrapping sentiment about itself and parading it as meaning. Salvation is as palpable as a billionaire's fifth mansion, the manifest of a want in a foreign moment. Which of us are supposed to be the orphans, again?

They'll have arrived at the hospital now, a procession of stately chaos bursting through the back doors. When they tell him he has to leave the room, he'll just give one of those stiff nods of his and walk out without a word, pacing on his bad leg in the waiting room, working his way through another pack in the parking lot, watching the broken bones and paper cuts come in with a desolate smugness like Cassius glimpsing the arrival of another righteous pagan. And when he burns through the last one, he'll go ask if there's been any change, if he could see her: displacement at its finest. Then, defeated, he'll limp away to go make some prayers of last resort, taking a seat with the rest of the worriers, looking at the floor like everyone else. This is how you pass hours.

* * *

Blessed are the living dead, the schizophrenic, the comatose, the catatonic. The stillborn, the demented, the suicidal sages. Every single soul that dies without hearing the name of God. Dear stranger, suffering on the frontier seas of my reality, do not ever doubt that I love you, need you in the most savage of ways. Your pathos is the fodder of my imagination, the art of your misery my constant inspiration.

And so I sit hear, dipping quill to vein, painting words upon the carnage of a spirit. This is my private perdition, my personal Stygian river. But like them all, it's a fragile perspective, a tottering existential perch capturing the still-life of the world, and it's only entropy holding it all together. I need their pain in order to define my own, to breathe life into this tundra of thought. And it is such a joy to rend apart the monochrome curtain of survival and subsistence, spewing bile and liquid strife upon the mechanical Eden. This is my word to the world, my mark upon life itself; I'll write a symphony of rapturous anguish, hoping no one will notice that it came from nowhere.

Past midnight now and still no word. How many of the others sit there wasting away so she can have the very best of mankind's contrived care? Nothing exalts like mortal agony, another irony; in our most wretched humanity, we are at our most holy. It's a conceit of ours, finding beauty in broken things. A ruined city evokes more awe than a whole one ever could. The mind is a simulacrum of God when it comes to engineering majesty, and like God, its creations have a tendency to shatter at the drop of an atom.

They've probably gotten past the pleasantries of ICU now. Maybe some enterprising nurse called CPS after an awkward conversation with the haggard old man. It wouldn't be the first time. Society likes to romanticize many things, but men in collars aren't one of them. No work of God being done here. We must be paying the Devil's price to eat his tax-granted food, sleep in these barren bedrooms. Never mind that we're all abortions with legs and breath, and sure, he isn't a nice man; not even a good man, but I've known worse. We were all born to worse, especially the murder-kids, the victim-legacies, the one whose parents actually wanted them. Someone should have spared us all the trouble. Nothing strangles so gently as an umbilical cord.

* * *

I was told I was beautiful once. I don't remember who or why. It's funny, the concept of beauty. So I laughed at them, whoever they were. My molecules buzz around in a pattern that the molecules in your eyes tell the molecules in your brain look better than some other people's molecules? Why, thank you. Who even says they're mine? How does that work? If I cut my arm off, is it still my arm, when it's lying there decomposing? At what point does it stop being mine? Why? I'm inclined to think it wasn't mine to begin with, but then, I like to think there's no “me” either. They never came close to getting the joke, just nodded awkwardly, smiled, compartmentalized and kept on talking.

My neighbors are getting restless. They're not my family because I don't believe in families, just selves cohabiting, dredging through existence in parallel. The younger ones are scared; one came knocking at my door, so I let him sit on my bed and watch me ignore my emotions.

Emotions. A divine equation, carefully measured additives of chemicals I forget the names to. Balance both sides for the desired variable and out pops a feeling that I immediately snatch up and remake myself around in the span of a thought. The real miracle is that the laboratory put itself together, even though the chemist never bothered to show up, and the experiments still go on, quaint permutations of each other, but never quite repeated.

I'm being stared at, but that's nothing unusual. It isn't me he's seeing anyway, but a possibility, a potential to trigger the comfort-response, make his tiny brain stop spazzing over perceived abandonment. Hate to break it to you, kid, but that's what life's about. So I won't. Let him think I'm just waiting for the right moment to acknowledge him and make it all better.

The phone's ringing, mine. It's him. So now it's time to pretend to care, clear my throat, answer with the proper amount of shaky foreboding, let him know we're just fine here, how worried we all are.

But I don't even get to say a word. He's sobbing, muttering, probably getting sympathetic looks from his compatriots in woe. I wait him out, wondering if I'm the first one of us he's called. That would be... amazing, in a grudging sort of way. Eventually, he manages two words before regressing into stuttering helplessness once again.

I hang up, wait a second, then turn around, look my little brother in the eyes as a realization strikes me. Judas isn't special at all. We're all being gnawed on by Satan, betrayed even as we betray ourselves again and again. A part of me wants to hug him, but it's the same part that's paralyzed with the ever-predictable human response of stunned disbelief in the face of the blisteringly obvious. So he'll have to make do with a frozen gaze as I obsess myself into a singularity over two words, bringing on the catharsis of a lifetime.

Radiation. Poisoning.

Edit: Aw, only 56.25 aurum, not even close to my record. :p