acorpseinthewood

[acorpseinthewood]

Addicted

First, let the substance in. 

Your body corrupts- it drops down and seeps into your blood, veins tainted with blazed chemical matter, skittering bugs crawling under skin. 

Your flesh grows pale as the venom runs electric, its purity draining you until your mind alienates your limbs, succumbing to emptiness.  

And as your eyes water, shortening vision unable to perceive all the violet, violent surroundings – wherever that might be – the poison finishes its assimilation at the fingertips of this body you've let it be. Unending colours fill collateral, high-pitched politics of sound screaming sacrilege, starved.  

Last, sustained silence. 

[acorpseinthewood]

There's Nothing Wrong with the Sky

It’s all over the news that you refuse to watch. People are already screaming, and the emergency services are crawling like dismembered bugs all over the world unable to do anything but fill the streets with chaos, stress and blood. 

When you go to work, you wear a big, wide-brimmed hat to block the sky. 

The train meets you with jolting shudders, the person running it seems a bit distracted. You don’t know why. Barely anyone hops on it- the platform is completely empty and the only people in sight are three middle-aged men on the other side of the track sitting in the bush, faint echoes of crying coming from their forms. The train blocks your sight of them as you step inside its metal maw and huddle yourself in your seat. The doors close and leave you with cotton in your ears, the outside world and the crying people dimmed.  

There’s one other person in the carriage with you- a small, scared girl, eyes pinned to the window above your head. Her gaze flickers to you for a second before she startles, her stop there, and then she’s gone. You’re all alone in your quiet dread now. 

No, nothing is wrong.  

You’re fine. 

You exit at your stop like you’ve done the last thousand days. The stink of the city is worse than you remember, filled with roiling smoke and the putrid stench of rot and vomit. You avoid the police station and all its sirens, the cafes and their gossipy terror, the booth with newspapers with one single big headline printed in both black ink and despair. It takes longer, but the alleys are quieter and the tall walls block the sky above you. You can still hear the screams and the sobs that litter the streets like the rancid rubbish lining your steps. Your phone buzzes frantically in your pocket. You ignore it. 

Work is empty. Strange. Unaware. Your footsteps inside the building are the only ones there, loud clacking like an ancient clock unknowing of the era it refuses to leave. The elevator’s cacophony of music is a welcoming choir, and inside its stomach is quiet for this hour.  

The doors open and you grumble about turning the lights on for the floor. You sit in your chair. You could pull out your laptop, but you know what’ll meet you there, so you leave it in the depths of your bag and snag a stack of paper to work on instead.  

Each moment you let creep along drags dread in its stead. Your phone won’t stop buzzing. 

The office stays quiet all day. You finish all your paperwork, and your lunch break is sat in dim nothing, the bread of your sandwich stale and bland. You move to close the blind, but a sharp light catches your attention, and before you know it your eyes are gripped by the falling death hanging in the sky, doom on a string.  

[acorpseinthewood]

Angel Killer.

You killed an angel, and its blood is burning your fingers. Its entrails tail your skittered steps as you escape its piercing, dead gaze, and there’s nothing you can do to be rid of the stink of the holy that coats you and clogs your nose with sweet raspberries and sweeter, golden, blood. 

You don’t know how you did it- your hands are not special, they’re flesh and they’re human. And there’s a dead angel that you killed and now, now you don’t know what to do. So you leave the body, it’s rotting carcass already blooming with light and new life, spilling acid onto the hard pavement and eating away the concrete underneath. 

And you run. 

What were you even thinking? The holy cannot be killed- you’re no priest but immortal blood's been spilled, they’re gonna find you, topped up with your guts rearranged and your life in tatters, god ain’t gonna matter. 

But you line your steps with gold ichor that won’t leave, its taint there forever. You leave the scene. Walk blocks in the dead of nothing, not even the sky opened up for a guide. You hop on a train, huddled on a cold seat, trailed with cold, dead eyes. 

You try to wipe your feet before entering home, but the gold will stay with you forever. It will never leave you alone. 

You cry before you sleep. The gold has sunk underneath your fingernails like an insect found its home and each time you touch something of anything it burns sharp and bright. Your tears burn too, but it’s not with holy despair but with the regrets and confusion of every fractalizing thought your mind comes up with and every song the wind outside shrieks against your walls. 

Your pillow becomes a comfort as you weep, and soon enough the stars grant you sleep as you sink heavily under the ground into the immovable realm of unconsciousness. 

Your dreams aren’t plagued- you wake up confused and tired. You sit up in bed, rub at your grief-stained cheeks and get on with the morning, your routine built into you with every trailing sweep your life leaves behind. 

Your feet touch the ground and you throw up. It’s nothing but the stinging acid of your insides, but it echoes the memory of the golden gore and you gag once more. You run to your bathroom, the tiled floor attacking the soles of your feet in such hate you know it knows what you did, and your hands latch on to the side of your sink and you throw up some more. 

On the train, everyone stares. Their eyes never touch you but it happens. They’re staring and they’re judging and they’re going to suffocate you under their invisible gazes, cruel and contained. They know what you did. They’ll come for you soon. 

Your heart twists and pulls, a motor pinching your veins into submission, run fast, run faster, you can’t die, you can't go. You stand far away from the corner, the puddle of gold underneath the seat identical to the one you tracked onto the train, its sight making you sick in the stomach. 

But work can’t wait. 

The train stops, starts, jutters and sieves its way through the city, a worm on an invisible string, dead inside yet full of the life it eats and then regurgitates again and again and again. People keep entering its maw like the too-trusting bird that cleans the alligator's teeth, and they leave when and only when the beast decides it’s done and clean. 

You stumble at your stop- the harsh, metal teeth nearly close around your neck, but you manage to escape both the creature and the eyes inside. Around you the outside world screams its features, people and buildings and grey and torture.  

You walk into your work, eyes bruised and bleeding tired, the walkways of the city a maze conquered only by desperation and mastery behind you.  

Work drags on as an impending doom on the horizon, each moment slower than the next, each second sharp and painful. They all stare at you, at the golden path you dragged from the front door to your desk. They cut you open and examine your insides, comparing the dripping red to the stark gold, pressuring your heart and your lungs into hating you too, they grip you with their disgust. The whole day goes without anyone talking to you. Years on end, it screws with your mind until you're shattering, glass smashed against the surge. 

Five o'clock never comes around until it does. And then your dead feet drag your dead body out the door and into the beyond.  

The train smiles when you return, its maw dripping gold after you enter. The corner seat laughs as you pass it, desperate to escape its sight into the next carriage.  

You escape at your stop, dropping down onto the streets, going home, going home, a pigeon in the dark bleeding despair and desperate for comfort. 

Your door clicks open and you stare down at the gold-stained welcome mat. Your fingers lose grip of your bag and it drops into the depths of a cavern, never to be found, never seen, because you can't look away from the mat and the gold and behind you, you know there's a winding, damning trail of it too, all linking back to you.  

You numbly go inside, avoiding the mat and shucking off your shoes. You grab a wipe and sit down at the table, soap in hand. You scrub and scrub and scrub at the soles of your feet, the gold stains spreading to the wipe and then the scourer and then anything else you can get your hands on.  

The gold follows you no matter what you do. 

Drops of red fleck your hands and join the puddle of gold on the ground, and yet your hands and your feet and your soul still shine that sickening colour you'll never let go. 

[acorpseinthewood]

A little poetry about life, living, and being trapped.

Like grasping at straws in a field 

Of ever-present snow, 

Gone are the ways we love, 

And in come the cash-flow. 

Breathing under the trees 

With leaves and leaves 

Of pale sickly green, 

We sit and look up onto the 

Black-stained sky 

With fog and ash 

And poison in our blood 

And rubbish in our brains. 

Our hands intertwine 

Not with each other, 

But the little bricks 

We text each other 

Only a breath away 

But a lifetime apart. 

Dusk sets the time 

Work must end, 

Yet thousands, millions, billions 

All sit at their desk saying 

“One more hour” 

For more time they spend 

The more they can fend.  

And what does this all achieve? 

The gods, if there are any, 

All groan in their graves 

While watching us make mistakes 

One after the other 

And at night, all we have is blue light 

Tired eyes and brown graves 

Awaiting the people 

Drawn in by the days 

Of which we all know 

Will end us, 

Like an injured bird 

In the snow. 

[acorpseinthewood]

Boom. First post.

Hello there! Nice to talk to the void.

I'm a writer, a part of the LGBTQ+, chronically not allowed near normal people, mad scientist at times and kooky wizard at others, etc., and this is where I'm going to dump all my miscellaneous works and tidbits, maybe even some bigger works, I'm not sure yet. I mostly write fantasy, horror (or at least attempted horror) and poetry, so you might see those here.

About myself- I use they/them pronouns, I live in a place that's way too hot sometimes, I love art (I've got a separate blog for some of my stuff). I also love the comic/series Heartstopper and love anime although I don't get to watch it much.

Feel free to ask anything- if I have time, I might give any writing requests a go, that sounds like fun.

Anyways. Goodbyyeeeee :)