#Steam is flowing out of my every orifice

[sandiegokpop]

Ok yall did not say he was holding his hips!

[schizoidnightmares]

Flesh Run, IX: Fleshed Out

A.I. placeholder artwork generated using NightCafe Stable Diffusion v1.5 — CC0 1.0

I break through a thick layer of membrane. Lucky pushes me forward from behind, and we both tumble into a large, wet, fleshy, cylindrical canal. Behind us from where we fell is the tunnel I dug, the ridged membrane quickly sealing it closed. Light, faintly passing through the encompassing membrane, dimly illuminates our surroundings. A shallow brown, murky, putrid liquid rests stagnantly up to our ankles. On either end of the canal is a large closed orifice. The air reeks and brings out tears from our eyes.

Watery squeaks echo from one of the canal’s ends as an orifice opens. It reveals a brown, rolling mass, almost filling the whole circumference of the canal. We feel a strong, warm breeze blow past as the mass rolls towards us. A chokingly rancid odour pervades the cavity. As it approaches, I can barely make out what appear to be limbs and faces, partially disintegrated into the brown rot.

Lucky turns and tugs at my hand; I nearly trip. We both run for the opposite end. Our feet stumble on the cartilaginous ridges that line the canal, and we make a sluggish pace. The liquid in the canal sucks back at our feet — flowing behind us towards the mass.

I can almost feel the mass grace my back as it tumbles after us. Lucky is the first to reach the closed orifice in front of us. After realizing I am still holding onto the uprooted tooth, I quickly toss it to them. They hard press the sharp end of the exposed root into the orifice. It opens just enough for them to slip their arm through. Lucky turns to me and desperately sticks out their other hand. I grasp it, and they pull us through the orifice — right as I feel the mass press against my back.

We slip into another cylindrical canal with a membrane wall partially blocking the way ahead. Yellow light scorches from beyond. I hear the orifice stretching open behind us — the mass pokes my back. Lucky moves ahead, skipping over the canal’s ridges with ease. They jump and reach up, gripping on the edge of the membrane wall, and pull themselves over. They stand on top of a membrane platform. I see only their silhouette in the blinding light. They crouch down and reach out to me.

I stumble over almost every ridge getting to them. They rapidly shake their hand at me — their palm open. I don’t dare look behind. Nearly losing my footing, I launch myself upwards with all my might. They don’t even wait for me to grasp their hand… They grip mine violently and throw me over onto the platform. The light blinds me like bones piercing my eyes. Lucky pulls me by my hand. I fall forward on my chest and they drag me on ahead across the membrane. The pressure of the light keeps my eyes closed shut.

The membrane floor suddenly changes, shifting to a steep incline. Gravity now takes over. As Lucky and I slide down, they lose the grip on my hand. I lose contact with the floor and feel an abrupt weightlessness before falling again. A thick puddle of mucous cushions my fall. Without delay, Lucky holds me under my arms and slides me to the side. They slip on the mucous, and we fall back on a rough, grainy surface. The ground shakes for a brief moment.

A breeze, colder than any I have felt before, blows over us. My skin tingles. I hesitate before slowly opening my eyes. Our surroundings are entirely unrecognizable. A soft blue light permeates a cavern. The surface is not membrane but instead is made of a dark black and brown gritty texture. The ground is frigid. In front of us lies the putrid mass. Steam flows off and around it, filling the cavern with a foul fog. Behind it, to the side, is the gaped orifice from where we came. Around its opening, the cavern’s surface appears melted, where it and the membrane meet. As it cools and solidifies before our eyes, it leaves behind a series of ridges of the same texture as the rest of the cavern. The orifice closes and transforms into the same frigid surface.

The faint blue light comes around the corner on our other side. Lucky and I get up and follow the light. The floor of the cavern numbs my feet. What we see beyond is a world without flesh. At the entrance to the cavern, we stand before a vast valley of sparsely green. The green concentrates on a blue flowing stream. Foggy masses drift far above us. A warmer breeze brushes the numbness off my toes. Blue light fills the valley, broken up by speckles of yellow rays from above.

We have left our mother.

Thank you for reading

This story is the ninth and final scene of “Flesh Run,” the first short story in Schizoid Nightmares Anthology I. The previous scene is available here. The next story is available here.

[floweringgravetender]

My side of the art trade for @scribblesquidz on insta

With a shake a pair of eyes open. Looking around all there is to see is a small cage with a sheet thrown over it. A pair of hands grabs the sheet and tries to pull it down. The cage was jostled aggressively. “Quit it, you’ll get out soon enough” a rough voice shrilled. The being in the cage lifted the sheet enough to see some surroundings. They were moving down a dimly lit hallway. Pipes snaked up and around the walls like intestines. There was steam puffing out of every orifice on the wall, to the point that even the ventilation system was having difficulties keeping up with the layer of steam that had risen to the ceiling. After realizing they weren’t getting any interesting or helpful views the being sat down and stared at the cage.

On the top of the cage where the bars met there was a reflective surface that acted like a mirror. Looking up, the being saw herself. A summer fairy, clothes laced with a muted saffron color, decorated with leaves and straw. Her name was Kori. She was meant to help bring out the change from spring to summer, pollinating the local area and allowing the summer atmosphere to bolster its way to center stage. Instead she was here, in a strange place, surrounded by metal and machines, with no nature in sight. Laying down, Kori took a deep breath. No use in struggling right now, not much she can do even if she did.

Eventually the cage stopped moving, waking Kori up. The sheet was lifted and a flash of light shocked Kori. When her eyes adjusted to the new lighting she found herself in a pristine white room with machinery in the middle. Gone was the tangled mess of steam and pipes, now there was a room made of nothing she had ever seen with machinery that made little to no sense. Turning around she saw a surprisingly well put together man standing near the cage, scribbling away on a clipboard. Looking down from his clipboard his face flared excitedly to see Kori was awake. 

“Well hello little one. I’m glad you’re awake.” the man said, pacing around the room. He turned back to Kori. “You may be wondering why you’re here, where you are, and much more. You’ll get your answers in due time.” He said looking back toward the machinery. Without so much of another word the man began clicking buttons and flicking levers. The machine hummed to life with puffs of steam and lights dancing. As the mere hum began to turn into a roar Kori began to grow more and more fearful of what the machine may be used for. She had seen machines before, mostly water powered ones to allow proper flow of water. However a machine of this magnitude was unheard of, at least to her. 

Looking around Kori could see more cages similar to the one she was placed in dotted around the room. Some had rust eating away at the base, others looked as though they were scorched by fire, some were simply covered in a sheet. The man turned around seeing Kori gazing out at the other machines. “I’m sure you must be wondering why I have so many of those laying around.” he said snidely. “Let's just say,” he paused, “you aren’t my first test subject.” He said followed by a small chuckle before hitting a large button on the machine.

A small port opened on the machine. The man lifted Kori’s cage and placed her inside horizontally. “Ladies and gentlemen please keep all hands, feet, and earthly possessions inside the vehicle at all times, this is going to be quite a bumpy ride” He said before erupting into maniacal laughter. Pushing the cage into the machine then closing the door. It was pitch black inside the machine, she could feel the air rushing around her. Then lights started to blare. They started spinning. Flashes of blue and white spun around Kori. She began to feel weak, her head was spinning and she was getting nauseous. Although difficult to hear due to the machine's volume while in full operation, Kori could hear something charging up. Then darkness.

Kori woke up in a different room. It was a much less technological room with stone brick and mortar walls with a small desk in the middle. She appeared to be on a shelf in the back corner of the room. The desk had papers strewn about and books open to random pages. Looking closer Kori could see the desk was covered in information about fairies, their anatomy, and powers. Then the temperature hit her, she felt ice cold in this room. Summer fairies had the ability to warm areas in a general vicinity to them. Kori tried to employ this tactic but try as she may she was unable to muster any sense of warmth for the frigide space. She looked down to see she was doing entirely the opposite, the ground near her feet was beginning to grow a frosty sheen with a layer of ice sprouting from her.

Then it hit her. She was no longer a Summer fairy. She was something different now. Under normal circumstances she had a beautiful yellow and orange aesthetic to her with buds similar to that of a lantana flower adorned around her outfit. Due to being a magical being even her skin color was a shade of yellow orange. She looked as if she radiated warmth like an afternoon sun. Now she was a cold blue. Her entire body had changed to seem more glacial chunk rather than a glowing bundle of warmth. Then she realized the cold she was feeling was radiating from her. That layer of ice she saw forming below her was fighting for ground against what was most likely the ambient temperature of the room. The ice had formed a circle that was centered below her.

Realizing the situation was more dire then she had first thought she stopped trying to warm herself up and started to look for a way out. Maybe if she got home she could find someone to help her. Looking around she noticed once she stopped trying to warm up the ice began to recede. She has control over it. As bad as this is she could use it to her advantage. Looking toward the lock of the cage she pressed her hand against it then began to try to freeze the lock solid. It took a minute to understand the intricacies of her new power but she got enough of a hang of it to freeze the lock and use the water to break it apart from the inside. The door flung open and Kori made her way out. Instead of flying gracefully to the desk she plummeted to the ground. New magic means new wings she had to get used to. 

She made her way up to the desk and toward the pages looking for anything to help her understand what's going on. Looking through the notebooks and pages all she could find was anatomy of her species and the energy they possessed. Then something caught her eye. A small page was sticking out of a closed notebook with some sort of schematic. Pulling the page out it was a dossier and blueprints for the machine Kori had been put into. Looking over the pages and then into the notebook there were notations and descriptions that went from scientific knowledge and explanations to barely understandable scribbles. “He’s insane,” Kori said under her breath. She said then heard footsteps walking toward the room, fumbling the piece of paper as she tried to hide. She was able to get out of sight just in time. 

“I knew it would work this time, I just knew it.” a voice said as they walked into the room. “But I didn’t know it would do this. This is different, I should write it down.” The voice said. Kori assumed the voice belonged to the man who captured her but it was difficult to tell over the sound of her own heart beat. She could hear the man lift up a sheet of paper. Shit, he found it Kori thought to herself. Then the sound of metal rattling. He found the cage too. “So you’re alive?” the man shouted, turning away from the desk. “Where could you be hiding?” the man said before leaving the room. 

Kori took this as a chance to make a break for any exit. She snuck around the parameter of the room, using bookshelves and filled vials to mask her silhouette. She made it to the door, peaking around the corner she could see a long hallway one way and a small dead end not far in the other direction. The man was standing near the dead end talking to himself. Kori couldn’t make out what he was saying. She tried to fly up to the overhead pipes to hide within those but her wings were still giving her trouble. The man had turned around and started walking back down the hall so Kori dove for cover in case he made his way back into the room.

Waiting for a moment Kori listened to his footsteps, they started at a brisk walk then accelerated to a sprint. The man began yelling something about a breakdown but he was moving too fast to make anything out. Kori figured his distraction was the perfect chance and he would follow him out. She ran as fast as she could behind the man. Then the lights shut off and alarms started to sound.

Looking around Kori began to get more and more afraid. She knew she had to fly out of here, it was the only way to keep up with the man. She thought of something. Just like how the ice that was generating around her was melting and forming a perfect circle around her, maybe her wings are affected by the same phenomenon. She turned around and the tips of her wings were gone leaving behind only around two thirds of the wings. She likely couldn’t feel the pain due to the cold numbing everything about her being. Using her powers she tried to refreeze her wing tips to no avail. Using quick thinking again she had to find something to brace any newly made ice to replace the wingtips. She jumped into action and allowed a circle of ice to form around her. Taking a shard of the ice she placed it onto the end of her wings and allowed it to slowly melt only to refreeze it into the shape of her wings.

Taking flight was still difficult as her wings were now much heavier then she was used to. Getting off the ground and getting some altitude and speed, Kori was able to make her way through the facility at speeds even she wasn’t used to. For feeling so bulky these wings were more nimble then Kori could have imagined. She was going to need it to get out of here safely. Looking behind her she saw heavy doors closing one after another, sealing off parts of the facility. She needed to get out of this hallway. Taking to her original plan of using the pipes to find a way out she followed the pipes that looked to be more important than the others.

She followed these pipes until she found a large bulkhead which was closed tight. Through a small window she could see her captor hitting a machine with a hammer. The machine was in a similar looking room to the one she was put into but it was entirely more dangerous looking. As the man hit the machine he was getting more and more frustrated with every smack he grew more frustrated. Eventually he hit it hard enough that a pipe broke open and steam bellowed out onto his face. Staggering back the man was in intense pain, although Kori felt no sympathy even this was difficult to watch. 

Kori flew in different directions until she found an open room. It was a large wooden clad room with many personal leisure items such as cigars, playing cards, and a small fireplace. “A fireplace!” Kori yelled in happiness. She knew a fireplace must have led to a chimney. Which means this very well could have been her ticket out of here. She went right up into the chimney. Seeing light she was hopeful.

Getting to the top of the chimney, Kori found herself in a small cabin built over the top of the chimney. It looked to be a facade to disguise the technological monster that lay below the ground. She had issues squeezing through the small grate that allowed smoke to travel from the facility below but she was out. The cabin was cozy but empty. There was still a chance someone lived here and Kori was not staying to figure out if they were friend or foe. She first tried the main door. Either locked or too heavy for her to open. Then the windows. Also locked. They looked around for any way she could possibly exit the house. For such a crudely built shack it had very few openings to get out.

She was close to giving up. She had gotten this far and now she’s trapped inside of a cabin somewhere with no way out. She laid down on a large stack of towels on the kitchen counter and began to accept her fate. 

As she laid down she looked up and saw something. There was a sunroof that was leaking. She was too stubborn to lay down now with an opportunity like this. She flew up to the window and began to freeze the water as it came through. Although this was a much bigger lock she likely could employ the same tactics she used before. She froze more and more water. The wood in the surrounding area began to warp and bend under the pressure. Then snap. 

A downpour of rain piled into the opening in the house. She was free. Kori had her chance to leave. Getting outside she realized the rain was a struggle to deal with. If she tried to freeze it before it got to her she would then have hail the size of her head hurling at her. If she let the water hit her it would start to freeze and leave streaks of ice behind she had to rub off. Taking shelter beneath a nearby tree she had time to think. Now that she was free she had a choice. She originally wanted to get out under the impression someone might be able to help her turn back. But she was enjoying her new powers too much to just get rid of them. But she likely wouldn’t be accepted back home, cold and summer don’t mix well. Although uncertain, all these things can wait. She was free to take all the time she needed because now she was free.

[cutemoniic]

Freeing Experience (pt.2)

   You step outside, fresh grass under your feet, and you're carrying a body: the one of a girl, still lifeless, flowing light blonde hair covering the head thrown around your shoulders like a sack of disgraced potatoes: a small revenge for her graceful, innocent beauty that seared into your eyelids.

    You wouldn't be able to lie if you said that what Wrath found you didn't suit your tastes: an angelic beauty, opposed to the powerful monstrosity you wanted him to get you. But you forgot to specify, and assumed that all angels that could have been grabbed could have been just uncanny valleys of ugly, so you simply thank him, and go on your merry way a few days later, the body in your hands freezing after a close experience with ice to keep it intact. Away from the house, in a safe place. You want a fair fight, and you guess that this is the closest thing you will obtain for that. But you can't help the disappointed sigh escaping your lips, and the adrenaline tingling at your joints.

    You're ready. Maybe, you always have been, and simply stalled the inevitable. 

    When you reach your destination -- a large, large patch of burned down grass and dirt in the middle of nowhere -- you let the body drop without an hint of grace nor mercy. It splays on the ground with bright eyes wide open, soft lips slighty apart and in a strange angle, with open arms and curled legs that you fix with your feet and less than proper care.

   The rest of the process is simple. It's like decanting the content of a jar in another one, careful not to let it spill: so your fingers move accordingly, brushing at your lips -- and with the slightest of hesitations, you softly blow on them.

   She tastes like death, even in soul, but you're more interested in the slight tug at your essence. With a distant, ear-shattering scream, you sense the pit in your stomach growing into an hole when the sole force of your breath detaches the murk from your soul. It flies, the horrible aftertaste of it passing your mouth forcing you to dry heave and almost drop the disgusting glob of dark murk in the palm of your hand. It doesn't, fortunately, and you grab one of her shoulders to force the essence into her mouth.

   It hesitates, clearly uncompatible.

   It's just for a small moment. Then it moves down her throat.

   Minutes pass, as you pace and wait for the soul to latch properly to the dead body. It will work. 

    You knew that you were good with decant. You have the final proof when new eyelids bat, and when she lifts herself up on her elbows. A small, girlish groan with a detestable girly voice erupts from her mouth, pearly teeth showing in all their pure beauty, and a flash of black hate deletes everything else from your memory.

    Then, she finally starts screaming.

    You expected that. Her eyes, limpid, clear and innocent, fills with dark sludge to the brim -- it pours down her face in dirty, sticky tears as she whrithes on the ground in agony, the strain of the new body forced to adapt her too much to stand still and simply accept it. Her nails pop off due to the overflow, her nose and throat become clogged as well, and you'd be lying if you were to say, later, that you didn't enjoyed her noises of choking and gagging on her own product. Her every orifice is trying to reject the substance, but it keeps spreading over her... it engulfs her completely, in a matter of mere minutes. It consumes the wings, her torso, her legs and tunic, leaving steaming holes in the soft fabric.

    You stand there, hands folded over your stomach, and watch her slowly stop struggling -- simply trembling, for a long, long while. When she has regained enough energies to slowly roll on her back and on her elbow, she looks at you.

   ''Hello. I can finally look at your face,'' you calmly greet her, a smirk on your lips.

   ''What did you do,'' she rasps out, demanding an answer with a snark that doesn't suit your tastes. You raise your eyebrows and don't speak to her for a while, delighted to see her choke on black, murky words dripping down her chin.

   ''What did you do?'' She asks better this time, panic in her voice. ''This body is... y--you did... why?''

   ''Because you deserve to suffer,'' you reply, tone soft like a pillow. ''And I'm pretty pleased with your state right now.''

    There's something wrong approaching you in the back of your mind that you cannot quite pinpoint, until it hits: something has been opened, and you sway on your feet and rear back until you can rest your bare back against a tree. You squeeze your eyes shut, cold sweat beading at the edge of your hairline and down your neck.

    There was just pain and suffering. A contract being signed in a dirty pub. Darkness. Him. The struggle. Roars and blood being spilled. Bars. Bare knees and hands moving on the ground and the memory of no words being spoken, other than simple ones and a cheerful, innocent tone that got broken too soon. Too quickly. He looks at you in a way that makes you despise being alive. She roars inside of you and you choke on tears of murk. You break into a sprint and wreck your throat with sobs as malignant, cackling demons pursue you. He places a scalpel on a tray and the world goes black and red and white and then you die. And you die. And you die. Behind a tapestry everyone is suffering, so you decide to help them. Mismatched eyes watching from behind bars. Scraping your nails on hard rock to reach for some natural salt minerals. The smell of cooked meat filling the room. A lot of soft voices, thanking you for the meal and your bravery, lulling you to sleep in your bad days, fixing you on something soft as you come back from the death. The slow, laughabe pace of the guards as they try and fail to chase you. Wails from inside you. You die. And you die. And you die. The pavement is warm and you have gravel stuck in your back and legs. The form of your dagger is permanently stamped in your palm. The vague image of a warm living room, a TV show running in the background as terror overtakes you. I have to go back there, I don't want to -- an empty stomach growls and you only see black until it's filled. There's blood on your hands and a corpse in front of you and it tastes heavenly and you're so sorry but you were so hungry and they looked so tasty and you want more and the smell of food wrecks you still and your head is rolling on the pavement and he's looking at you in disgust disgust disgust and you have disappointed him again but you want to get out and you die and you die and you die and there's a soft haunting music in your mind that you cannot pinpoint and he picks the food from your sprawled body and tsks and tells you to do better next time  and then he cuts you down after you talk because he's your father right and he'll never hurt you but he does and you're bleeding and you run and drag yourself on the warm stones and there's the fire the fire the fire the FIRE THE FIRE ---

    You dry heave. Slowly come back to your senses and find yourself covered in sweat, and slumped against the hard tree, who has dug into your back like a particulary fierce lover. Your breath is skyrocketing into a panic attack, and you drag sticky hands down your face.

    Calm down. Calm down...

    And you do.

    The sensation, after you command your body to cease manifestations of deep distress, obeys you. The sweat is still present, but your panic is swallowed as a numbing sensation spreads across your chest.

    Which, you figure, it's better than still panicking. You're in awe at how... controlled you can feel, at how quickly you return to reality from the sea of memories swimming in your brain.

    Something sinks into the corner of your lips, and tears away. For a split moment, you think that it's part of a memory. Then you feel the murk sticking to your open wound and material and blood starting to gush out, a sickly face closing on you again, and you react with a set of reflexes that leaves you speechless.

   Your combact training, without you never remembering one, come in natural, fluent moves of your trained, fit body. The water-like dance you can pursue while holding your dagger leaves you mesmerized, puzzled at your new knowledge. And when in doubt, you enter His office unannounced.

 He doesn't need to lift his gaze from the paperwork he's buried nose deep in. He knows that it's you, and the fragrant sound of papers being shifted stops for a moment to allow you to speak.

 ''How... how do I know what to do while I fight? I never had this training before. What did you do to me...?''

 This question seems to puzzle him: crimson hues leave the trail of written thoughts for a moment, fix themselves on your small figure (and the shiver they give off is always the same, no matter how calm he is) and doesn't miss a beat to clarify the situation.

 ''What I implanted in your body was not simply your essence: along with it, I morphed you as a warrior. You lacked certaint knowledge, and I inserted what you didn't had into your core. You have experience because I deemed you fit to be one of my underlings.''

 You probably offered him a break from his work that he wanted to take (or so you hope), and you see him slowly lifting himself up from the marvellous, soft chair he was resting in -- and with slow, methodical steps, he strides in front of you.

 ''But the knowledge I inserted in you is minor, simply the basics of defending and ending a life, when needed. But the motions, the other techniques... I did not touched them. So they must reside in your new body.''

 A shiver ripples down your spine for a moment, his hand slipping out from the elaborate golden sleeve in an inviting motion.

 ''Give me your hand.''

 This is the most intimate you've ever been with him from what you remember. Shy and insecure, you extend your hand out -- and there's something that warns you about placing the bundle of nerves that your appendix became into his care. Because his presence strikes defined chords in you, and his hands are slender and gelid.

 The sensation proves right when he tries to wrap cold fingers around your wrist, and it's instinctive for you to abnormally tense up and react quicker than your mind intends to, sliding your warmth from his numbing coldness and jump behind a few steps, putting a safe distance between you two. Your breath is uneven, erratic, shock easily overcoming you. Your hand is itching to reach into your chest and pluck out a dagger, to bristle the skin with the smooth blade. Even your own creator's one.

 He, in a staggering contrast, does not bat a lash. Slowly, unphazedly so, he retracts his hand inside his sleeve again and crosses them behind his back.

 ''This is what I meant.''

 A pause.

 ''Your reflexes. Little of this belongs to you as an essence, but rather to the body you own. It's a simple concept that, I am sure, you'll have grasped after my explation.''

 The time that he decided to dedicate to you is over, you understand the verbal dismissal he meant and quickly scutter out of the room to find some peace of mind.

  You launch the dagger into her melting skin, and slash. And hack. And tear, the substance clinging to the blade. You scream when she slips away, and tears at the skin of your arm with her sharp, jade teeth.

  ''It's mine,'' she says, between chews. ''It's my body.''

  She swallows, calmly, and you feel the exposed gum and teeth grow sensible to the cold air and to your crescent panic.

 ''I'll just hhhhhh--ave to eat you, little child.''

 Calm down, you will to yourself again. And you do, a cold sensation of awareness spreading across your limbs.

  You don't really wanna be eaten. Not now that you're so close to success.

  She gets to your arm again, but the edge of your dagger is swiftly stuck between her teeth. You twist it and tear most of them out, panting and turning her with a knee to her stomach. Black murk is stuck everywhere, and it takes you a while to recognize that it's coming from you, rather than her.

  What's happening?, you ask, vomiting a mouthful of sludge on the ground. When she attacks again, you simply stick your dagger out --

  And when she dodges, drawling out a groaned growl, you twist your body and arm to split her apart with an even cut. The sludge parts and returns together, a deep, red gash underneath that is barely being covered.

  Blade meets bone in another assault. It screeches against it, and you release your hold on her gurgling body before grasping at it again, and facing her directly.

 ''Leave,'' you hiss, chest rumbling. ''Leave right now. Go away. Go to Heaven or to rot back into the ground, for all I care. Come near me again -- and I will dissolve you in acid. You fucking... fucking monster.''

  ''No,'' she rasps out. ''My body...''

   Anger rushes out of an unknown place inside your stomach. You coil like a springlock ready to burst, right in her face.

   ''IT'S MY BODY! YOU LOST IT!''

    She draws back, stunned. All she can manage to hiss its ''thievling,'' before she scutters away in the secure refuge of the woods, glowering ambers that are her eyes following you for a moment before they disappear into the leafage. You feel her presence disappear off your property.

   Something tells you that she will not attack you again.

   There's crimson blood on the ground, and you feel dizzy. You walk back to the house mostly unscathed, covering your mouth with your hand and scraping at the blood on your exposed teeth. Despite the panicky situation, you feel calm and collected -- if not a bit surprised at how quick the whole ordeal was. Your teeth feel numb, too. 

   But there’s this new sensation... calmness, an endless one. You don’t rush home, instead sporting a relaxed pace despite the minor injuries and the whole situation that just happened. 

   This one is gonna be a bitch to heal, you're sure...

   But, at least, you’re in control now.

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

The Composite Black ch.1

He crackles with such abominable laughter. Emblazoned on his mulish mask of tapered sinew, hate-hewn flesh folds caked with dust and brusque are wide swathes of topological erosion.  This is the dermatological attrition of ghouls and goblins, creatures of depravity and denizens of sacrilege, monsters whose skin weathers and bleaches in the divine of the daylight.  His garish façade is the embossment from a nightmare, a face that haunted the sculptor’s sleep, ensnared eternal in gothic stone gargoyles or the twisted grimace of an amputated stub adorning a tortured ashen oak.  His wrinkles purse like snake pleats, shivering subtly, coiled around his contemptuous orifices, intermittently blustered about by the intake of his olfactory snot-pits and wreathed around a rancid gyre of dental shards. Pan up but avoid the swallowing riptide of his gawk, those arrested by the shifting guise of his lunatic looking-glass eyes are often burnt asunder in smears of soot.  They are eyes of caged aggression, of molten wrath, volcano eyes that sear what they see.  The color of spent fuel, of cadaverous cinders, broken glass and smoke damage. Encircling this myopia is the crown-of-thorns of his brow, framing his persona like a band of spear-spiked dagger-tooth crags.  These are accelerated geologic processes, flexing tectonic plates which know not the placation of a tranquil lull; their beveled furrows exist in a duality of disgust and mockery.  Cast-iron rims lipping twin cauldrons, forever bubbling.  

This is a hardened, deadened man whose scars shroud his marred body and mind.  Each patch of discolored tissue that tattoos him tells tales, mostly violent and cruel. But the companion text is tenfold the volume, bedecking disfigured corpses strung about his travels.  Most he left horizontal but some he let vertical, a fate hardly better.  Those who walk the world mangled by the bite of his blade speak a bit softer, keep an eye at their backs, wake sweaty in the night.  He is the shade which haunts their periphery, cloaking uncertainty in fear and calling out to them from the shadows.  Just a winking remembrance causes the heart to race, the pupils to dilate, and the past superimposes the present.  A torture wheel of cyclical trauma, perpetual terror of a deathblow half inflicted.  His victims are many; they line cemeteries and bar stools, numb and cold to the touch. Almost as if he burned their spirits on the flaming alter of his own vehemence then let them frost over, a sacrifice to savagery, a vulgar display of power.      

No matter.  “Let the dead rot and the livin’ scorn,” blistering words from his blistered lips, shaky and sun-sick in the dry heat of the early morn.

“I dare say yer yella hide won’t last til’ noon. Those buzzards circlin’ up there won’t waste a horse’s fart before they’re on ya like the flies, pickin your eyes out, digging through your gizzard.  I bet even half past 11 you’ll look even more like a dimes worth of dog meat than your ugly mug does now.  Matter of fact maybe when your boots stop kickin I oughta cut you down from that tree and drag your sorry carcass through the mud into town so that the strays can each get a good meal from ya. It’ll be the only good thing you ever did for this town.”

Even as he said this, serrating his speech with disdain, the creases of the undertaker’s neck shook with fright.  He felt as he had as a little boy throwing rocks at tethered dogs, hoping that in their fury the stake anchoring them wouldn’t be snatched from the dirt.  The evil within this man seemed unnatural, impossible.  It was foreign to him, this relentless rage, foreign to this tiny town pitted on the outskirts of dusty emptiness.  This tiny town, where Main Street is the only street and whose primary riffraff are a few rough tough cattle rustlers, vagrant out-of-towners drawing from the herd come the fat flock of Spring time.  Enter this black frothing demon whose snide grin makes the white dressed church ladies sign the cross, a smirk which consumeth like hellfire, and paradise becomes pit.  Anubis had seen his share of atrocities, sights which may have maddened one of fragile temperament. He’d been a field medic in the Spanish war.  Seen, heard and sometimes felt the splatter of men being shredded into mincemeat, splayed inside out by scalding shards of metal. He’d repressed much of those wretched memories, loosing them on his past future, which even now harass every moment of absent rest.  And the days were not long passed when he’d been called on as the chief embalmer to clean up after a few of the Union’s scorched earth campaigns, burying massacred Hopi women and children, of all the vile things, in yellow-earthen mass graves usually after weeks of decay and carrion pick-throughs.  He’d even had to put down his only daughter when her body swelled up with gangrene, but the carnage left by this awful man, this brimstone beast, was the brutality of legend.  This was the monster before him, the twisted serpent of the apocalypse, Apep, fettered in maat by Osiris’ noose.

Then the shark put away his sawtooth bouquet, pivoting his rope burned neck in the guillotine of the hangman’s hoop, directing his vociferous focus on another individual from the small crowd of the witnesses who’d climbed the hill to watch this dreadful man’s death.  The old Indian woman Xmucane met his fiery craters with her own cataracted pupils, a challenge in defiance, adversaries horn-locked on the battlefield of all space and time.  Their concentrated beams of perception met and clashed, smoldering with static energy.  

The words rose out of him and blew toward their mark like a waft of chemical death, “Have you come to tell my fortune grandmother? I should hope that even a blind ol’ witch like you could see the signs of my fate today.  Or maybe you’re just so disoriented and confused you just wandered up here on this hill like the geriatric ol’ hag you are.  Too..” his lips began to leak a rotten-colored mucus foam as they flapped and pursed and sneered.  Spurts punctuated his rabid barks as the muscles in his whole body contracted in spasms of steaming rage.  His carapace turned a furious shade of boiled red. “young to die and too old to screw! I’ve seen moldy cow pies that…” a gruff fit of gravelly coughing seized the doomed man so that any further curses became just choking hoarse gasps.  Minutes passed and the hacking only worsened until only a few caustic spasms and the muted gurgling of air being forced through thick fluid remained.  Suddenly within the leather of the man, the smoke-blackened corridors of his body flooded with sludge, his air passages became expulsion channels for emergency discharge.  Prison-food regurgitation geysered up the tunnel of his throat and waterfalled out of the cave mouth.  The gastrointestinal flow sizzled down his jailbird stripes in chunks of grey dribble as eyes, nose and gob spurted like drainage faucets.  At last, when the conniption ceased, the muscles holding him ridged loosed limp, letting his weight dangle from the rope collaring him for a moment. Coated in perspiration and exhaustion, all that was left of him was the furnace of his anger and a heaving breath.  Air pressure writhed against the pressure of the lariat strangling his airway, lungs bursting in heft.  

Xmucane was already halfway down the hill, strutting slowly and steadily, never looking back, never uttering a word; she just continued driving her cane into the dry earth followed up by each hoary shuffle step. This repeated in rhythmic synchronicity as her short precise movements churned the declining distance back to town, through glades and gullies, past rockslides and embankments, hugging the curvature of the trail and moving like the passing minutes.  Somewhere, there amongst the bramble, a whisking river resided as an auditory undercurrent, a rivulet which had conveyed sediment from distant mountains for hundreds of thousands of years.  This is the sculptor who carved Hangman’s Hill from bare plane. It reached out from within the drape of the trees at a spot perpendicular with the crook in the trail of the advancing ancient seer, Xmucane, greeting her with roaring thunder from the mountains.  She continued on past the Road to Xibalba, with her descended her daughter-in-law the waning moon, fading into the light of day.  

“In nomine Iesu Christi, Deus et Dominus noster, Immaculatae Virginis intercessione ab ipsis Maria..”

In the Name of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, strengthened by the intercession of the immaculate Virgin Mary..

Back atop Hangman’s Hill, at the seat of the execution of this nameless man, the preceding spectacle of grotesque behaviors attracted like moth to flame the mercy of god’s instrument on earth, the surrogate of Papal presence, the local orthodoxical authority of godliness, the Catholic missionary Ruggieri degli Ubaldini.  With the bluff as his sandy pulpit he exercised training he’d received in the seminary as a youth.  Vocal muscle memory and gospel rigmarole drilled ad nauseam under the oratorical tutelage of the Head Father at the rocky coastline church of San Miguel.  He fondly recalled praying to the Blessed Virgin those many years ago on bent knee, tightly gripping the Bible and rosary his parents had given to him, trembling with righteousness in that stuffy old adobe chapel as chartreuse swells of spray crashed against the rocks. There were times of distant recollection when the word of god resound within his mind like vivid hanging melodic lines of Gregorian monks bounding out of mass halls and cathedrals.  But with the melting years his faith had become by jaded by dour funeral processions and exorbitant church politics.  He clutched his indented Holy Book in one crinkled hand and the other pressed palm forward, shaking with a bit of the hall-hallowed vindication he’d once felt but mostly just the fear of an excruciating death at the hands of this tenuously bound hellion.  He prayed as if blacksmithing a suit of armor.  

“Mother of God, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beatis apostolis tuis Petro et Paulo, et omnibus sanctis auctoritate officii nostri potentem..”

Mother of God, of blessed Michael the archangel, of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints and powerful in the holy authority of our ministry..

“suscipere fidenter impetus propulsare insidias diabolic..”

we confidently undertake to repulse the attacks and deceits of the devil..

A light breeze swept the hillcrest. Misty dew-laden air whisped up in thermal currents as the freshly angled sun warmed the valleys of wildflowers and sod below, cycling moisture.  The breeze ruffled multicolored swatches of deciduous leaves stapled onto the fronds and twigs of the circular band of white oaks which surrounded the site of the hanging.  Then the breeze tousled the silent crowd, flexing hat brims, swaying ties, brushing skirt tails, flapping pant-legs, bringing dusty tears to dry eyes behind the veil of handkerchiefs.  Finally the wind rippled into the ganglion of the scene stirring its focal subject.   The man’s limp unconscious body swiveled slightly in the stirrup of the noose strung from the single low-hanging splintered branch of the lone dead tree.  However most of his inanimate weight remained planted to the earth, supported by locked knees atop an aged fruit box, its paint flecking.  A crystalline snail of spittle oozed from the gape of his mouth and was blown and whipped around by the current around the side of his head, seeping into one of the few remaining haggard tufts of bristle on the back of his desiccated scalp.  

“Deus oritur; inimici ejus dispersus est et qui oderunt eum, a facie ejus, secundum impellere fumum..”

God arises; His enemies are scattered and those who hate Him flee before Him. As smoke is driven away..

“ita pulsi sunt; sicut exustio ignis tabescerent, sic animam meam in conspectu Domini. Ecce crucem Dómini..”

So are they driven; as wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish at the presence of God. Behold the Cross of the Lord..

“fugite inimicorum. Leo de tribu Iuda, radix David, qui vicit. Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos quanta speravimus in te..”

Flee bands of enemies. The Lion of the tribe of Juda, the offspring of David, hath conquered. May thy mercy, Lord, descend upon us as great as our hope in thee..

The diminutive old man paused after that line for a dangling moment, taking a rasped breath and wiping the sweat dripping down his forehead with a cross-embroidered handkerchief produced from within the folds of his black vestments.  A few syllables still hung in the air, echoes of Medieval Latin ricocheting off canyon cathedrals, saguaro shrines, stain glass mirage.  But the point of omni-ocular convergence remained the captive.  The small crowd of tense observers were fixated, captivated by the captive, as if the depth of their focus was his only restraints.  It had to be unequivocal, this man’s extinction; if even an iota of irresolute distress remained it would be catastrophic to these quiet people and their small agrestic community.  It had to be confirmed, the light leaving his eyes, so they could live once again in their accustomed peace.  Ruggieri continued..

“Adjutorium nostrum in nobis, quicumque haec legis, Et spiritus immundi, omnis satanica viribus, omnes invadentes infernali, omnia impium legiones, et coetus sectis..”

We drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects..

“In nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi et eius virtute, ut sit Deus et effugare ab ecclesia et ab animabus ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei, divini agni sanguine redemisti. Serpens callidissime..”

In the Name and by the power of our lord Jesus Christ, may you be snatched away and driven from the church of God and from the souls made to the image and likeness of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the divine lamb. Most cunning serpent..

“YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS?!!  You do well to utter such flattery but this meagre title leaves much to be desired by my parched discrimination.  My sapless ear has reached but a fractional portion of its full satiation and demons these days just don’t grovel as they did in those glorious days of old, the Fall anew, when plague shadows of locusts and immortal armies of darkness smote the world under my blood blackened banner. Abbadon? Lucifer? Perhaps Wicked One? Or Deciever? Appolyon is what the Greeks called me or maybe you’re feeling particularly biblical, in that case the classic Hebrew is utter elation.  Bleed your tribute and yield your dignity, lay paltry and prostrate before the infamous Beelzbub.  Nothing says ‘Prince of Darkness’ like a black winged monster that manipulates buzzing clouds of ravenous flying insects.  Although my personal favorite is good ol’ Satan, doesn’t the word just remind you of pagan blood orgies and violent fertility sacrifices cast under occult torchlight? Ssssaaataann.  It rolls off the tongue, or hisses off if yours is forked I suppose.  Let’s all say it together! Saaataan… Saaaaatan…”

“Decipere humanum genus ultra audeas, Dei Ecclesiam persequi, ac Dei electos excutere et cribrare sicut triticum..”

You shall no more dare to deceive the human race, persecute the Church, torment God's elect and sift them as wheat..

“Imperat tibi Deus altissimus, he, cui in magna tua superbia te similem haberi adhuc præsumis. Imperat tibi Deus Pater..”

The most high God commands you, He with whom, in your great insolence, you still claim to be equal. God the father commands you..

“Imperat tibi Deus Filius. Imperat tibi Deus Spiritus Sanctus.  Christus Dei Verbum caro factum, imperat”

God the son commands you. God the holy ghost commands you. Christ, God's word made flesh, commands you..

“Your feeble crusader dogma and moral avarice is fetid muck pilled high by sociopathic old men, deceptively arranged to countervail their own perverted chastity and empathetic ineptitude.  The theologic doctrines to which you egregiously prescribe, and to which you presume supremacy are just the bones and bits, carrion detritus, convenient canon leftovers that you have culturally appropriated and reconfigured from semi-legitimate religious heritages into a hypocritical, racist and sexist, anthropocentric cult of personality and fanaticism.  The tyranny, genocide and mass subjugation performed by the filthy, bloodstained tentacles of your Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and all its puppet entities and dummy financial institutions is as heinous an act of malign villainy as has ever been committed, and it occurs in the light of day, applauded by boisterous mobs of enraptured subjects. It’s commendable, it really is.  Such blood-draining callousness, such wanton barbarism, such murked wickedness.  We are brothers you and I, legionnaires of death. Don’t you remember? We cut ourselves out from the same womb.  Don’t waste your breathe Padre, let us entwine our barbed fingers, for together we can concoct such exquisite chaos and mouthwatering malcontent.”      

“Qui pro salute generis nostri tua invidia perditi, humiliavit semetipsum factus oboediens usque ad mortem..”

He who to save our race outdone through your envy, humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death..

“Qui Ecclesiam suam ædificavit supra firmam petram, et portas inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam, cum ea ipse permansurus omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi..”

He who has built His church on the firm rock and declared that the gates of hell shall not prevail against Her, because He will dwell with Her all days even to the end of the world..

“Ergo, draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica, adjuramus te per Deum vivum, per Deum verum, per Deum sanctum..”

Thus, cursed dragon, and you, diabolical legions, we adjure you by the living God, by the true God, by the holy God..

“Per Deum, qui sic dilexit mundum, ut Filium suum unigenitum daret, ut omnes qui credit in eum, non pereat, sed habeat vitam aeternam..”

By the God who so loved the world that he gave up his only son, that every soul believing in him might not perish but have life everlasting..

“Cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque æternæ perditionìs venenum eis; desine Ecclesiæ nocere, et ejus libertati..”

Stop deceiving human creatures and pouring out to them the poison of eternal damnation; stop harming the church and hindering her liberty..

“Vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis..”

Be gone, Satan, inventor and master of all deceit, enemy of man's salvation..

Explosively vaulted across the physical and virtuous distance between these two men was a putrid projectile, an expulsion of contempt, a gust its coconspirator.  The coagulated salivary squirt was a conglomerate of gastric ebullition, nostril slop, fermented dental scum and various caramel colored pusses and oozes from infected teeth, gums and cold sores.  The noxious cocktail erupted in a sticky spray that coated the clandestine breeze, commodiously transporting the range strike to its unsuspecting target. A toxic cloud of insolence and filth assaulted the castigating old man, penetrating his saintly demeanor.  It splattered in tobacco tinged splashes across his gold rimmed spectacles, a bit of the acrid pitch inflamed the sensitive peripheral creases of his naked eyes.  While most of the foul fluid doused his sun-spotted forehead and drooping cheeks, lathering them in slime, a portion cemented to his short lampshade mustache while another equitable fraction spewed into his articulating mouth via direct oral transmission.  Vomiting ensued and part of the crowd rushed over to aid the collapsing Ruggieri until he waved them off, wildly swaying up from his knees with his bible clenched under his arm.  The brown old skeleton doggedly rose to his feet and continued the exorcism, shaking in his robes, sweat pouring down the troughs in his face.  The nameless man just laughed and laughed, a rapping sound like a fissure tearing open the ground or a mammoth wave slapping a stone shore or a shimmering bolt of lightning shredding the clouds, low pitched and decrepitating.    

“Da locum Christo, in quo nihil invenisti de operibus tuis; da locum unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, quam Christus acquisivit Sanguine suo pretio..”

Give place to Christ in whom you have found none of your works; give place to the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church acquired by Christ at the price of His blood..

“Humiliare sub potenti manu Dei; contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine Jesu, quem inferi tremunt..”

Stoop beneath the all-powerful hand of God; tremble and flee when we invoke the holy and terrible name of Jesus, this name which causes hell to tremble..

“Cui Virtutes nomen istud et Potestates et Dominationes subjectæ sunt caeli, hoc indesinenter quem Cherubim et Seraphim..”

This name to which the virtues, powers and dominations of heaven are humbly submissive, this name which the cherubim and seraphim praise unceasingly..

“Dicentes: Sanctus Sanctus, Sanctus..”

Repeating: holy, holy, holy..

“HAAAHAHA HEHE AHHHHAAAAAAAAHAHA HEHE!.....”

“Better save your prayers for decent folk, Padre. This one here is just a few heel clicks away from feeding the worms at the bottom of an unmarked grave.  I don’t reckon we’ll hear his sorry squawks when he’s buried six feet under being dragged to hell by goblins and ghouls. Why don’t you give it a rest son? What would your momma say, seein’ you up there spittin’ an’ laughing like a mad-man, carrying on so shamefully, right before you meet your maker?”

“Oh I don’t know if my mother would have much to say in the matter.  She sort of lost her voice when I was born, as well as a heap of internal organs. What can I say; I was a very needy, grabby infant.  But I’m sure it made for an eventful day for the country doctor at the county courthouse, a birth certificate and a death certificate all in one wagon ride!”

“That’s enough young man.  No sense in speakin’ ill of the dearly departed now that my gavel’s swung and your noose fitted.  The big judge sittin’ up there in the sky probably has enough scorned testimony marked against your spoiled soul as it is.”

What perfunctory sympathy he usually felt for those he’d sentenced to capital annihilation had completely eroded within the judge at this point, soured in his gut like green meat.  This man was nothing to him, horse-shit stuck to the heel of his boot, malted hogwash foaming in the sun.  Yet how could ultimate justice still feel so inequitable? Tragic pawns, passive hosts of death reproducing itself.  Putting down vile men for vile acts leaves their stench on you, their skin under your fingernails, their curses echoing your ears.  After being the eminent lawman, judge and jury with a chrome peacekeeper for nearly twenty years in this township, ghosts with bullet holes in their heads followed Yama around.  If he looked over his shoulder he knew he’d see them standing there, garbed in caked blood and charnel dirt, forgotten children grown up.  “Another for the spooks,” he’d tell the barkeep each night.  With whiskey on his breath he’d sing to the sunrise, silky phantoms surrounding him. “There's blood on the saddle and blood on the ground, and a great great big puddle of blood all around; a cowboy lay in it, all covered with gore, and he never will ride any broncos no more..”

The sun beat down, acquiescing its focal zenith, heightening the midday heat.  Its rays dissolved the gruesome gaggle’s shadows like the razing eye of god, whitewashing the hillcrest in solar bleach.  High noon aproacheth, the awful hour of death.  A brazen beam struck Yama’s copper badge, ricocheting off into the prisoner’s soggy iris, branding it like a blacksmith’s white-hot nail. The scorch only magnified as the lawman took limped steps towards the disheveled captive, his spurs and leather speaking softly.  Nameless and noosed, the damned man recoiled at the brilliant bright, squirming in his chains, insulating himself under clinched eyelids.  

“The time is nigh, boy.”

From behind the wiry judge approached the town doctor, a shriveled cob pipe pinned under his icicle white mustache and a hand restraining his charcoal bowler against the pull of the wind.  His slacks brushed through the ankle-high wildgrass until the accused hinged faintly within arm’s length. Dhanvantari, the wizened backcountry surgeon, reached up as he had at countless executions to examine the machine of death.  In a far off lifetime, or only what seemed to have been, Dhanvantari was a merchant ship’s doctor, operating on deck with rusty instruments in turbulent seas, pulling the captain’s teeth by crinkling wicks of sperm oil lanterns, sweeping puddles of blood into the sea.  Those decades spent marinering the open ocean made his fingers as fluent with knots and lashings as he was with the braids of the spine or with tensile ligament musculature. This man had lost many lifetimes to the sea, swallowed by brine, swept overboard by swells, but somehow it always spat him back out, after due restitution.  How many times had he thought he’d seen the sun for the last time as the waves closed around him and the surface fell away?  Six? Seven?  Perhaps he was still there now, drifting to the salty bottom and this, an illusion in the last rays of light, an eternity in an escaping air bubble.  Regardless he thumbed the noose knot, testing its competence, ignorant of the murdering intimidation ensnared within it.  He examined the loop, stretching it across the man’s Adam’s apple in strangulation simulation.  By his determination death should be nearly instantaneous with the fracturing of the epistropheus.  Dhanvantari removed his hands.

“Whaddaya say Doc? Humane?”

“Too humane.”

“Oh I wish that was up to me, hell I’d have him drawn and quartered already, each arm and leg’d be draggin’ through the desert in opposite directions by streakin’ stallions by now.  But I suppose a bullet in the temple would get the job done too. No time to waste with slaphappy daydreams, we’ve got to adhere to the distinguished code established by our competent elect, those Washington monkeys and their executive goon.  Is it whats-his-name Rutherford or wha-cha-ya ma-call-it Garfield after the last one of their confounded dog-and-pony-show elections? God only knows.. How’s about we get on with it?  Next the accused is to be read their offenses but I’m sure all of us gathered here and now can well attest to the horrendous acts of brutality this man has committed.  No sense in speakin’ of such evil since his deplorable deeds will undoubtedly torment our waking hours forever.  But I won’t deny the prisoner his last words.  Even an infernal devil can sequester some semblance of penitence from the Lord in his last hour if his voice holds even an ounce of goodness. What say you, rogue? Bless thy tongue and utter thy last words.”  

“I have nothing to say to you people or your forlorn humanity.  I was birthed among you but sever our kinship thereafter.  Your bastard race of mutant hominids is the scourge of existence. You ungraciously tout your dubiously predominant intellect with one arm raised in self-admiration while the other quashes down your stricken brother, stepping on his pleading face and bruised throat.  You feed each other into the teeth of the meat grinder for a few pieces of silver, sealing the audacity with a smile and a kiss.  You’ve the blood of your father Ares and the fury of your mother Lyssa. Such horrific worm-like abominations of filth, I want no part of you unless you’re disinfected, dismembered, dissected and freeze-dried.  But you have taught me much, much barbarity.  Because of your imprint I am what I am, the distilled essence of your misanthropy, hate tincture.  I am the anti-soul, the maneater, the devourer of fire and light, the siren of the necropolis, the falling reaper, Death’s dragoon.  I am the one to whom the wolves howl and in my company volts of vultures and cackles of hyenas.  Draped in my cape of babies’ bones and crown of thorns I have blistered the nightmares of the fearful since the dawn of man.   In my wake spite suicides and human husks, desolation and brimstone. You cannot kill me, I am already dead.”

His taunt a command, Yama reduced him to mindless thrashing with a decisive toe-kick to the fruit box, sending it tumbling off before stepping back and affirming his capital judgement.  Gasps ran through the crowd as the knot was tested for capacity for the first time, the charred branch held strong under the burden of the man’s now disintegrating ego.  He expended his life force in feral flounders of wild muscle contractions, as if parasitic monsters within him wrestled to escape from their host’s diminishing body, spinning himself around haphazardly like a broken whirligig despite his wrist and ankle restraints.  Clearly his movements were involuntary, spastic seizures of shocked nerve endings triggered by raging lightning storms of neuronal firing as distressed organ systems desperately faced shut down and annihilation.  His already unsightly appearance became even more revolting in the absence of mental dispensation.  Cloudy eyes pinched in their sockets, bulging outward in masses of crimson jelly as the blood vessels ruptured around flaked lids. Indeterminate sloughs of foamy fluids composed of various pasty consistencies, textures and hues leaked from his orifices, drooling off the dripping points on his face like subterranean stalactites.  A scarred sliver of grey tongue draped from within his chapped lips.  Eventually the jittery agitation ceased and the stillness was broken only by the swivels of his vacant body.  His grizzled neck was crumpled in the noose, disjointed disks of irregular vertebrae pressed asymmetrically against the inner walls of his skin in nauseating bulges of obvious malformation.  

In the crowd a woman began to wail, her immediate elicit reaction to the majority of external stimuli after such loss as befitting a victim who had been made widow by the now deceased bane.  She pulled her black bonnet down over her eyes and reached for her threadbare handkerchief.  Now what? A question she posed to herself, the fates, townsfolk, anyone who’d listen to her bereaved sobs.  Her maternity scars and her wedding ring were the only remaining evidence of her curriculum vitae, her frontier family and their homestead ambition; stolen like the breath from her lungs.  Somewhere along the wagon trail, abandoned in the gutter like a roadside attraction were the charred remains of her Manifest Destiny, a monument of torched wagon frame and scattered skulls. The thought of which drove her to nihilism. But revenge was an opportune emotional departure from the tragedy her faculties refuted as preposterous, incorrigible, a night terror to be expunged by the waking mind and the ascending sun. But confound it!  There it was! That dastardly conflagration, a gleaming confirmation of calamity, the boiling skies its diabolic domain and drenched in its glow she simmered in survivor’s grief.  Niobe willed the hellmouth open, to stride between its chasmal jaws.  Her ample offerings of woe lured the rabid devils and unclean spirits from their untold ethereal realms but on upon arrival she was already of stone.  A brooding destitute, an aimless golem of flesh and bone and tears.

From within the congregation Anubis stepped forth to dress and prepare the body for burial, a process which his coarse muscles and tired joints knew well.  They were creased by the contour of the embalming tools, sculpted by a mortician’s toil; grave dirt under his cuticles from the raw tomb shoveled out this morning.  He unsheathed a blade from his belt, feet advancing, to cut down the inert cadaver from its moored swing.  Behind him his comrades held the reins of a bridled burro which had ferried the bound prisoner to this hill in life and would now from it in death.  It shifted listlessly in its halter, braying nervously with whipping tail.  He approached the hanged man serenely, detached, his mind distanced by the habitual funerary ritual he’d undergone so frequently this past fortnight with so many hideously slaughtered.  But at rest his morbid vocation invaded the asylum of his slumber.  Within the dreamscape he donned the suit of a jackal breathlessly devouring grisly messes strewn about by Death himself, scavenging meat morsels from innocents slain.  But it was over now, the beast was vanquished and this would be his final burial.  He extended his arms, blade in hand, to cleave the noose when the whiskers on his scruff spiked straight up.    

The dead man frenzied into rampage by the scent of slaughter, riving the lull, summoned to survive by his colleague in chaos the razor blade.  The tumultuous details of the next few moments can scarcely be spoken of, saturated with skirmish vectors and martial artistry but if one simply follows the slashes of the edge, its perforatory operation can be fluently plotted.  In one swift motion his blueish corpse-hand swaddled the knife’s pommel, enveloping Anubis’.  It then yanked upwards, burying the tip just underneath the undertaker’s chin, tickling his brain like a lobotomist.  The next instantaneous flash of dynamism was the stiletto’s evacuation from his greymatter.  It whistled as it arced through the air, tearing into the fiend’s own death-paled shatter-boned neck, sinking in and carving in a radial orbit around its circumference.  In a splitting second the ruined mort had accomplished a series of obscene acts totally unforeseen, completely against the natural laws while still bound in chains, and as such, the throng was baffled immobile.  Aghast with gaped mouth and opaque eyes before such ruthlessness, the man holding the burro’s reins barely noticed as it bolted off. Yama’s hand lunged for his holstered pistol as Anubis finally dropped to his knees.

As the last degree of girth was rent, gravity bisected the possessed’s brainstem, sending his feet to tread the earth and his dislodged cranium to roll it, unencumbering the blood-sprayed noose loop.  At this point fright overtook the cluster and fugue became imperative.  They trampled each other to flee this undead waif, careening down the hillside, never mind the trail with evil nipping at the heels. But one gallant soul delayed, familiar with the company of demons.  Yama leveled his revolver at the headless monster loosing three rounds before it was upon him, lopping off his gun hand, hacking through his throat and spilling open his intestines in one mercurial, clockwise arm rotation of serpentine laceration.  Like a tornado it bucked off Yama’s dead shoulders after trailing fingers relieved the weapon from his amputated grip, tumbling acrobatically through the gap between its next kill.  

Scrambling to escape was Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, sprawling over his tailored robes, clawing the muck for leverage with gold ringed fingers. A cone of destructive force interrupted the priest’s bumbling with a tremendous boom of sound shattering.  The slug pierced his temporal lobe just behind the ear, exploding from the other side in a plume of gore and smoke.  Padre crumpled in the dust but his soul soared skybound on angel wings while cherubim and seraphim beckoned him from their hammocks, the clouds.  Another righteous crusader of light skewered on the flames of evil and so sealed was his heavenly reward, obedient even in martyrdom to the cult he worshipped.   The gates of St. Peter were thrown open upon on his winged approach, the celestial scene frescoed immortal by Nuvolone’s Milanese masterpiece.  But the earth claimed his body, to the victor the spoils.

Twin claps of corkscrewing thunder plowed two more inconsequentials, their flaccid constitution summersaulted down an embankment in snaps of branches, dousing the underbrush with their blood.  The doctor, Dhanvantari afforded a precarious over-the-shoulder peak at the proximate commotion between labored footfalls, just long enough to see Death’s skeleton-hand reach for his face.  And then he was dragged to the frothy underbelly, towed from the shallows to breathless leagues of darkness, to the frigid depths, the domain of the leviathan and its swimming monsters.  His cob pipe floated up to the surface like an epitaph.  

Last alive was the half-hearted Niobe, tailed by her shadow of mourning.  She fled on instinct alone, lusting for a peaceful deathbed to lay her head.  She mused macabre that she’d be visited by twinkling visions of her loved ones, at last reunited in paradise after they carried her from her sepulchral bedstead, off and away into the white light. Her wits were unraveled by the poison of this unfulfilled conclusion, drunk with adrenaline at concept of such unimaginable pain of an undoubtedly savage mutilation.  The tree line broke and a valley of Spring-bloomed wildflowers carpeted her clambering passage with purple street signs of knapweed and rushpink, golden sidewalks of butterfly weed and bahia, creamy bushels of loveroot and turkeypea. She sprinted through their syrupy bells with hiked dress and tapping laced leather boots, soon slathered with aromatic pollen.  Their perfume seeped into her psyche, fumed by her exhausted inhalations, tousling her antediluvian reptilian cortex, the cerebral seat of fear and flight.  The flowers drenched her in a calm, resonant bliss which relaxed her gait.  Suddenly she stopped.  Her shadow had dissipated and she found herself on the embanked edge of the lily field, below a river’s bellowing whitewater scrapped against huge agate boulders.  A slight draft swept through the valley, undulating the buttercups and the tassels of her braided hair.  Where had she lost her bonnet?  She peered down and found it tangled in spines of sagebrush but her reach was interrupted by a blindsiding death.  The monstrosity shoulder tackled her while her weight was unbalanced, tossing them both off the ledge of the cliff.  It stabbed her repeatedly while falling, madly puncturing her face down to her abdomen with glossy lesions.

The white dashing crests of alpine water slapped the hurtling pair, bowing under their load and momentum.  The sacred stream drew them into its clutches, buffeting their languid corpses with jagged rapids succeeding in the thorough pulverization of their now unrecognizable meat mishmash.  Hunks of homogenous human peripherals floated downstream like the foodstuffs conveyer belt in a packing plant.  A few flesh pocked bones flipped and twisted, arrested by the current as its skeletal companions swept by the festivities, a sanguine parade.  Soon they were utterly mired on an outcropping of some rocks, the fisherman’s net of an eddy.  Passing nearby Anubis’ knife head embedded itself in the iridescent quartz-spackled river bottom.  Fast in pursuit, bouncing and bobbing like lost baubles in the whitewater, the two handcuffed fists of the nameless man inexplicably threaded a chain-link with the marooned blade.  That duplicity of hand dangled there for years; shackled, shriveled rotten flesh, palpitating so near the portal to Xibalba.  The subterranean aqueduct portion of the road’s journey began only a few hundred yards downriver, where the river water surged under the foot of the mountain.  Underground, within its cavernous limestone bowels, the freshwater runoff engaged green, salty aquafers from the distant sea.  An apparitional estuary, the nether-door to the underworld.  

Unseeing eyes parted on the decapitated head of the desperado, pealing open the world.  Though his awareness was distressingly limited, somehow the slurred outlines of shape and form came to mean something to him.  A bush.  An uncomfortable bush with prickly thorns and homely desert flowers, this was likely his setting, the bramble hemmed the borders of his peripherals like a picture frame.  Central to his porthole of vision was the simple sky, an impressionist composition of sowed blots of buttercream and torpid sheets of blue.  It was all too much, too weighty, too involved; it swam and swooned before him like a rocking bowl of water, filling him up, pressing him into the earth with its gravity.  From his phantom body, he felt each toe, each patch of skin.  Though he knew it missing, the nervous signals must’ve disseminated from a source, some sensory connection, or his brain seemed to believe so.  The invisible air squeezed his surface area.  Tightened tourniquets burdened him like a full body straightjacket or a collapsing cast.  “A mountain must have fallen on me,” he spoke without lips a sparse cognition.  The clouds seemed to descend from the sky, fused and swirled in milky stripes of fog and spewed into the man’s mouth, nose and ears.  It retarded his lucidity and reason, soon laden with dusty dunes of bewilderment. The world was a mirage of dancing light.

Then the dam began to crack.  He felt crooked fissures snaking across his skull and body like spreading vines, soon he would rupture and there was nothing to be done. Sure enough the bleeding cracks started to sweat the liquids from his body; blood, bile and lymph, and as they leaked they whispered a static hiss. Gushhhhhhhhh.  The noise vibrated through him and up to his ears, he heard it as though underwater; berating, omnidirectional and boisterous.  The gashes grew thick in sinuous ropes of entanglement, infesting ostensibly the extent of his being.  And through them breached torrents of life-water overflow.  The crevices poured out the viscous distillation with the cacophony of a thousand teeming waterfalls.  There was nothing but the thunder, no room for anything else. Its density rose past any measure of volume until it overcame him, overtaking his presence by force of will. Suddenly it crescendoed and was gone, dissolving in a fizzle of diffuse ringing.  The drainage had stopped as well, he was now presumably empty.  He cried out from the hollow of his head but was not heard, his hearing had left him.  What reverberated instead however was fear; a ping of hysteria.  In absent mannerism he desperately reached for his face and found just ruined fragments, quivering lumps of lips and chin, like crushed scraps of a Mardi Gras mask.  Hunks snapped off as his fingertips probed for a landmark, an eye socket, a cheekbone, something familiar to enshrine his ego but there was barely anything left.  He broke his pointer finger off at the knuckle scouring a caved in nostril cavity in his mania.  “Hell, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.  What do I care?” his internal thoughts illumed apathetically, for his speech facilities were in white corroded shambles.  From his powdered granules of ravaged carnage a breath of smoke arose, the rubble dust twirled up towards the void, suctioned into the lofty abyss where it surveyed from above.  

Then flames reared up like pillars of plasmic light, engorged by the heat of combustion.  Jagged tongues lapped hungrily at the abraded man whose consciousness was amorphous and unsensing, only dimly cognizant of self-presence. An incendiary holocaust raged sensation away.  Every ounce of feeling was expunged in a deliberate eradication, neuronal overstimulation to excess until the connectivity wore through and the atomic structure crumbled in fatigue.  The heap of blanched biologic matter was scarified to complete tactile stupefaction, unrecognizing even neighboring cells.  Then the conflagration expired having extracted the last of its nourishment and his botch of body cooled off.  

First the warmth left the deteriorated boneyard of his extremities, vanishing into ice like the last warm days of Autumn, blanketing the plaster hunks of disintegrating anatomy in inches of snow. Next to succumb to anesthesia was his chest of decrepit organs, frozen solid in their collapsed disrepair, forgotten now in the advancing permafrost of numbness. Last was his mess of frostbitten face, abandoned in paralysis, left to entropy.  A nearly bare mindscape was the man’s totality now, devoid of light and motion, vibration and sound, texture and touch.  His being was only tethered to locality by lingering senses of smell and taste which now dominated his concern.  Driving columns of bellowed air churned in opposite directions within lungs and sinuses that he knew were imaginary figments, apparitional muscle memories, repackaged experiential data.  Astral nostrils flecked with astral ether intake, sifting its contents. Each unlikely breath was a kaleidoscope of pungent samples comingled from various lifetimes and experiential encounters: a fresh peeled apple, steam off quenched metal, damp mattress body odor, a musty draft from the root cellar, miscellaneous tails of perfume on a street corner, etc.  Soon faded had the aromas’ potency, gradually sojourning elsewhere.  The circulations of invisible current also ceased and without its tidal oscillation there was stillness.  But before its last drags a cloudburst of amber sparks, an eruption of fireflies to festoon the sparse canvas of nothingness.  “Where do you lead, oh wavering stars? Abridge this inked abyss.”

That was when an even more extensive purgatory of nothingness descended on his bleak reality of senseless ambivalence.  Abandoned in a crawlspace of the universe, dreary anathema, doldrums of inaction, his operative reality was staggeringly reduced to a naked impression of existing, as if lingering on the threshold of non-being.  His lifeline was taste; last vestige of a world that had all but forgotten him.  His formless presence diffused into the surrounding unknown at uncontrolled random, performing its forsaken duty because the possibility of anything else did not exist.  Stimuli drifted in and out of his localized perception like a filter feeder’s chum, exotic glimpses of a fully realized world beyond this low dimension, rationale for perseverance.  This continued for an imperceptible interval, perhaps ten thousand years, perhaps a hummingbird’s heartbeat.  Over time the meaninglessness came to mean even less to the erratic coagulation of man, now only a remote ancestor of his worldly persona devolved and inbred.  It tongued the grey brittle of its immediacy, probing the filth and cobwebs of its hermitage for traces of vim, for even a hint of neurological input or residual aftertaste, anything to subdue the mental paralysis.  “I’ve no business left here.  Take from me what you will but don’t leave me in this hall of mirrors.” And at long last the candle flame was extinguished, leaving the smoke to dissipate and disseminate throughout the universe, replenishing omission, stuffing lack, becoming again.    

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