He raised an arm, still gasping. Tunnels opened all atop his cranium, and his skull became a pin-cushion of swirling, whirling eyes. They swept, squinting for image. He saw in all directions panoramic. A wave scuttled to me. They made crackling sounds. I found myself wishing I'd brought a hefty jar of poison.
At all sides, concrete cracked. Directly in front, a slab tore free, rocking the walls. He'd cornered me as a consequence of poorly understood mathematical function, calculoid symmetries yielding ratios pertaining to the capabilities of the human body in unfamiliar situations, gauging reaction time breathing heart rate and muscle stipulations. Even now, disfigured, he understood nothing of self awareness.
The slab was five feet high. Rushing, it tore to me, tide breaking stone, sweating dull powder to either side. It had a face, oh yes: flatness and old markings in the sedimentary skin, unseeing, unthinking. It rushed. The garbage hadn't been touched in almost half a year. It made me wish I was made of a fortified grade of titanium, the unbreakable kind, that had none of the weakness of skin, though maybe I could afford to go with steel.
I climbed. The dumpster, still there, provided height, at exact odds to uselessness. Lunging, I lipped the top and passed it over, unbelievably touching the top with the back of one leg. Until now, I'd never thought of myself as being made of water. In the most strenuous of situations, I surprise myself.
::::::::::::::::::::
The mountains
were rough as
granulated
steel
on the way up, though the higher I got it gave way to the slickness
of icy cold, numbing the tips of fingers. I could
manage to pull myself
because I was strong, apparently,
though I'd never thought of myself as being strong
before.
Up above,
the moon
was
very
large.::::::::::::::::::::
In tiredness, he choked. Dead spiders lie to either side, flattened against the wall, pasted to a layer of fleshy juice, searing in venom. Evacuating strains poured from him, a million scraping legs. They made webs in direction, taking to the walls, an arachnoid spreading. Stumbling, I took hold of a cylindrical molding, composed mainly of iron, which in more casual times I might have referred to as a pipe, if not for the juvenile connotations. Looking out (two hollow, outflowing sockets and fifty red holes), he feared me.
sWINGING
I lopped him through the face, cutting horizontal past the brittle shield of bone. Visage came untangled. His skull hit a wall, still flying, and buckled to the ground. Fifty crimson miniatures acclimated to him, dislodged. They were red. Their backs bore bleeding eyes. They crawled from tiny holes, wriggling all over. They gasped for breath in the merciless outside.
From Jacob's opening sprang something covered almost entirely in eyes and hair. It had sixteen legs and clung with them, letting go sounds of squishing flesh, merciless parasitism. It probed his ears, clung through them; set staves through nose and mouth, staring at me. The whole bulbous mass of it writhed, a vilified strain, destructive.
::::::::::::::::::::
Stabbing
with the pipe,
I pegged it
to the wall
behind.
These people were sick, and their campfires were a mess of bleeding horseflesh
and badly tended crops. Sickly grinning, they wore masks
of hollow leather skin that never stopped grinning. In conjunction,
the whole evil lot of them, they
laughed together, dumping blood drawings
on canvasses made of the same leathered skin.
Looking down, from atop
a high mountain, I
saw them all at once, taking in their stench.
They smelled like
a world without a shower, tasted
like the droppings of an infected animal
about to die, laying
at midday in a sweating pool of sun, green ooze pouring from the gaps in its skin.
rebuked me, by
setting obstacles, by hurling dangers, but I have
no fear of coldness, that that which remembers
the emptiness
at the origin of the soul, unmoving in itself, The mountain in its harshness, as all around, niched in the center of the universe, a
brocade of lights
broke out swirling
to swallow all
sense of center, a howling dip
in the archways.
I climbed, squinting, and the mountain
fed me the remains
of old bones.
Licking white remnants, I grew,
(tiring)
ever closer
to the moon.
::::::::::::::::::::
She wasn't there alone.
(That's not to say.)
She took my world and refracted it, laced furiously in pandemic voices. She gave me fury, and I traced it back to her, my epidemic queen, she was, we danced all
night in cool moonlight, and talked about meetings, about rain.
The police came for us, but we were already gone. And even though people
told stories about her, unless I believed in them, very few, if any, were true. With her I was a vilified, expressionist sort, of their, the kind who couldn't
help but grasping
for a taste of absolute beauty. Her formlessness, her voluptuous sense of
the awesome, dug tunnels in me, and let flow a whole
purifying infinity outflow, rushing water
carving routes of drainage all into, out of my lungs. She made me less, made me
more than human, by
humoring me. As of now, I'd seen her thrice (once in life, again in refraction, and a precursor in dreams) and all three times,
she'd never
been alone.
:::::::::::::::::::: "I need to find her."
James held my shoulder. He said I really shouldn't.
"And you're going to help me," I said, "because you know where she's at." That might be true.
"If you find her," he said, "he'll send them for you."
"And if I wait," I said, "he'll come for me himself."
James sighed. He stuck a hand in his pocket. Loud music from another room
assaulted us. I was in the mood for loud music. Detached from the personal, it soothed me.
"If you tell me," I said, "I'll paint a huge banner of you in real colors all over main street, so no matter where you look, people will see you, and, without being, you can be everywhere at once."
"You're funny."
"I know."
"But really," he said. "Why do you tell such strange lies?"
"Because I've been spending too much time with girls," I said, "and they've been
teaching me how to lie."
"You're funny," he repeated.
"I know."
::::::::::::::::::::