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It is winter again, and I truly hate what I've created.
This is the second thing I have ever painted.
The first was my excusable trial, the second. . . nothing worth a damn to any God who may hear my soulless cries. My trial left me with acrylic stains over my clothes, and the coating of baptised straw. Lots and lots of straw. I spent twenty three hours on it. Seven the first morning. Six the next. Four the third, and finally finished it with another six.
I ruined it within the day.
Never showed it to Mother. Never showed it to anyone but myself, and even that was a shameful showing. Covered in paint and plant fiber, sitting on the ground with my legs folded to my sides. Just looking up at that thing: that silo wall, gloating with her face and mine.
She never saw the stage I set for us. I made sure of it.
She will never see me finish a painting. Today is the last day I may paint, and the scene is asking me to paint her.
The burning smog in the air today. The valley, thick with the metallic stench.
You could see all the way down to the bottom of the tonsils. Baby bridge and a crimson haze coiled like a living thing, threading their way across the fractured marble, each tendril a promise of ruin. Mist, an astronaut of sorts. She climbs vicious and oppressive where the sky itself has been wounded and bleeds out onto the earth. She climbs high to the taste of iron and ash, opens her mouth wide to taste a general lack of shapes, and lifts her head to find an isolating distance between herself and the world. Nothing within reach. One bridge, leading to nowhere, one bridge whose borders distorted by the wavering shroud of red lies silent and calm. Nothing moved here nor there, not one but my lady bridge who groans, a child's steel bones weary from bearing the weight of uselessness. Wires made keening wail, soft cry raw and jagged instable and the smog, all swirling and thickening thing, swallows the walkways whole. It might be years until it collapses, but I would be here. Waiting for the inevitable.
My entire artless life, waiting for the inevitable day it would fall.
The paint mixes with the dirt and trembles beneath my canvas of feet, leaping to her demise down the side of the cliff. None make it close enough to touch the bridge. It is farther than I thought, even for a rabbit boy like me. A dirty mess, a dirty motherhood. A soft art, my mother, my sweetless mother. The brush too swollen with expectation, too hollow with any semblance of reality. My life began with hers, but I have only felt it exist truly in the slow disintegration of myself, a relentless erosion by the cries that never cease, the hands that always reach, and the silence that fills the spaces she leaves behind. There is no true mother but a body repurposed, a heart diluted into a thousand separate demands, scraps and pieces of love stolen before they can even form whole thoughtless things. I am told by her that it was a gift to be a mother, but it is more like a trade, a silent agreement signed in blood where you surrender to the slow decay of what you once were, the days until you return to what once was us. My brush leaves her contractee to fend for herself, and here I stand on the crest of that leaning hill.
Flowers. Snow. Mud. The ground beneath my feet– miles of damp slickness, soft with the moss and the decay, a green so vivid it pulsates the last heartbeat of a desolate, decadent world. The fog sprawls out like a hungry sea in its thickness, an impenetrable aliveness, unwilling to leave. It consumes the valley in agonizing silence, swallowing the earth's gurgles, leaving no trace of the paths I once knew. It breathes slowly, deliberately, shifting in currents that pull at the edges of my vision and waits for me to have the balls to descend, to disappear into its embrace and to fall guardless, the red bathing grave I could only hope to seize. I wait in panic for her final awakening.
There is no horizon, only a fading line where the fog meets the sky. I paint an empty space where color and light once existed but have since been devoured. The ruling red took the throne and blade to slaughter all other. I cannot tell where the earth ends and the void begins, a world which now exists without any chains to pull me forth. The fog rises, forgotten fire curling upward dark and dense, carrying with it the weight of a life I do not wish to recall. There are crimson voices in the distance of the canvas. Soft, distorted echoes, whispers that melt into the abysmal mist before they reach me. The wind, mourning things lost to her sinking byssal. My ghost is pink and green beneath the inkblot shape, a sad little thing, strand by strand placed by place in a land lacking proper ghosts. It clings to me, the death above the life, an island of end. Yet the more I stare into the fog, the more I feel it pulling. There is something in that lightness waiting, watching. The fog does not reveal. It consumes. My mother was a liar. The blackness beneath is not an absence but a presence, alive and knowable. I can feel it stir in its evilness. My God, I feel it stir.
I am drawn to the edge of the hill, my little feet burdened where the earth itself wants to hold me back. My breathly soft and shocked features fall downwards with grace as I gaze past and more into the metal fog. Down, down the depths where no light dares to venture, down and consumed into that little charcoal inferno of pitched light, the stageless bases where my canvas may begin to cross the gap. There is something out there. I cannot see it, but I know it wears itself out there, lurking beyond the veil. I know if I descend, I will be swallowed, loved like the paths that once wove through this place. The green will fade, and I will resolve into the void, another echo in the mist, a demon of pink and grey.
It only tempts me more.
Could you ever hate what you are?
Could you ever hate what you make so effortlessly, so passionately, so unmovingly that you'll never appreciate anything you've done? Would you even know what it's like to be human, my God? Could I be the last being alive– and why here? Why now?
Why must I bear the cross of being completely alone in this world?
But, my God refuses to answer me. I cannot paint. I cannot find her answers above the realm's borders, my gleaming, blurry fog, and not without a brush. Simply fingers will never make do. The ink calls to me not in words but in the weight of its silence, in the gravity of its pull, her paint, her stench, her stains. My hands tremble as I press soft steps of air into it, press breath and exhale into the cold. I am in a dark place where the world ends and something else begins. But, I do not move. Not yet. The fog waits, and so. . . so shall I.
My breath, she wonders, my limbs, they struggle, but movement will not come, and nothing, nothing happens. Why, Mother? Why is nothing I say Art?
I try so hard. I speak so many things, all of them, all of them regurgitated. I speak the same cadence as the only books I have ever read and I tell you,
"Great holes secretly are digged where Earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk which ought to crawl."
We are holes. Holes and strings meant to be plucked, stars meant to be wasted, and entire worlds meant to be cast away. We are itching to devolve. I am the paintless artifact! The talentless wretch! I am the last person to grieve in this aching city. I am the only one to know its breathing, to feel its hunger, to encapsulate all that could be my home. It is only a burden to bear. I feel so much shame at the very thought. I don't wish to be the last. I was placed and burdened in a time where there were no more. I do not deserve to live, Mother. I am not worth effort, nor appearances. I am not worth friends, nor city, nor bright sun. I'm sorry, Mother. I'm afraid I'm worth nothing at all.
Who will come for me, my God? Nobody, nobody would. Who would you create to thrust upon me salvation? Who would medicate me, inspire me, hold me? Who would give their time for me, my God? Who would give their time for a murderer? No. Worse. A shameless coward who couldn't unplug his own mother. A shameless coward who forced his mother to suicide. A shameless coward who could not say goodbye. I damned her to Hell with my weakness. Why do I still hope that they come for me? Why do I still hope for warmth and comfort, knowing these things'll never touch me? You won't spare me, my God. In agony, you leave me forced to spare myself.
This golden sky is tarnished, the green sun dimming her opulent rays, and my mood would only ruin others. I know what I am. The unit that made me me, the incendiary charges, the accusatory blood that runs through my system. I know it. The world has abandoned me. My mother soon after, and then, there was no more. I don't want to remain here and rot away. The world should no longer be affected by my disease. I regret my acts. I regret them all, but. . . I couldn't live like this, Mother. Not so far away from anything art. Not so effortfully imperfect.
I will never be good enough for me. For my mother, I'm great. She seemed happy enough with my doodles, drawing day by day. Always overjoyed. Always more than I deserved. But, she never knew the ugliness that resided inside of me. She never saw me for what I truly was. On this cliff, I discard my past self and die a new man. I will die something new in the name of making my mother proud.
I ran down the little paths when I was a child once. Jumping around. Dancing with sketches in hand to show my brush, her gleaming grin. Sketches for my mother. Sketches for someone much more deserving of life than I.
The chisel pokes the little vein. It is a force needing application, but the skin is no match. The blood drips down the canvas, etching in my noir the empty promises I may provoke from hollow receptacles. I am only a probability. A small, infinitesimal probability. My kind do not deserve to live long. They are rarely born out of such intense shame. Most die in their humiliation, unfathomable to amount to anything. The lives I have utilized, the budgets I have surpassed in the great halls of living, I deserve no more. Alone, I remain. King of kings, honor behooved, the incumbent dream. Alone, I, the artist unartly, here I stand. Now, I have lived nothing. But, I have done this to myself. I deserved it, Mother. I deserved it all.
When I was a kid at the end of that leafless path, there were two buildings that stood side by side. Beautiful little shacks with fencepost windows. Banners on the edges, white papers lengthened and inscribed with black ink, their little hats of special black stones. They were twins. My mom told me that one once sold tea, the other simple snacks and cake. They were brothers, those buildings. They had the same shrubs, same mats, same windows. They were washed together and renovated together. They decorated for the holidays together, opened and closed for Kwanzaa together. They did everything together. And on the golden day when they stopped beating together, both twins died.
They weren't buildings with purpose anymore.
They were just blocks. Old, decrepit blocks with sets of ashy pillars. Chordless songs. Songless cords that wrapped around one another just to die at separate intervals on the same day. That is the fate I must avoid. I am justified in this. But, I am fighting nothingness. It is human nature to die misunderstood and alone. I tell myself this as the blood runs down my rips.
I deserve it, dearest Art. I don't wish to die, but I, I am alone. I am alone with you, my God. I deserve this isolation. Let me be left behind. Let me be reduced to nothingness, and produce in me the righteousness of submission. I know this isn't right. . . not to you, never to you, my God. But, this may be the only right thing left to do.
I have not slept in a few days. I do not wish to sleep but once more. There is a staircase I long to descend, a bridge beneath I long to cross.
I am a failure, God. I am untalented, unremarkable, irrefutable garbage. I am nothing. Not smart, not kind, not beautiful, not anything at all. I'm fully second-place, even my name I can't place a second behind. I have so much shame inside of me. To whom is this directed to? To whom do I submit my hatreds and ineptitudes? To Whom, my God– to Whom? To whom, to whom, to whom! Read them over and over, my God. Read them until I dissolve, until the words don't seem like words anymore. Words that descend into the fog with nothing to show but left shriveling at their scorn and hatred for me. Have you felt them before? The dark coils of shame? The breezes stagnating, the strong-standing, ever-eternal breathing shame? The smog of my mother's breath, her empty home, empty of breath. My home, robbed of my mother, my mother robbed of her God; to me, still I hear her calling to me. I know I do not belong in this world. I am a failure who is unworthy and insentient. I belong to the overruling. I hear the empty outlet's cry. I am alone. I am full. I am longing. I am ashamed. I am no longer me. I am no longer Jesse. There was no reason for me to have ever been born. Just like those twins, their dimming lanterns, those buildings I once loved. They lost their art. They were no longer worth their space in the world and fought all, just to die alone.
I grip the blade tightly, my knuckles paling in quiet resolve. A breeze stirs, carrying with it a sound. Low at first, imperceptible, a rumble creeping in and out from beneath the shadowed canopy. It rises, folding over itself in layers of primality, in justice, and in pure, desperate entropy. I raise the implement high above my chest. I'm so tired, my God. I just want to rest.
The air is thinner again, splitting where I had just wished it beginning. I hang there in silence. There is something quieter. A little bit more heavy in my arms. My lungs intake air that will not sustain me, the implement too burdensome to carry. But, I hear it. I hear it in the shine of the knife, in the gleam of her pupil's very own eye, in the shrine of the death I feel deserved and worthy. I hear it wrapped in her leather bindings.
Solemnity, crying green grievances give their small kick and join the falling leaves riding bikes amidst spinning winds, a scream of me in the last empty shell of all I ever wished to be. A slow little shriek that grows larger and rolls through swirling wails and makes snowmen out of the volume of circled-up words. A scream that I do not know how to hear.
"JESSE! JESSE! MY SON!"
And her claws of sound dig deep their keratin spikes into the depths of my bleeding husk of chest, prying at the hollow certainties within the sensual proclivities. The knife slips from my trembling fingers and falls free, down the blood her acrylic, down the magnet falling further into the chasm that yawns open before my cyanide sneer. I watch it downly clatter, the metallic glint swallowed by the abyss as it plunges, my lover growing distance in the dark depths below, below me and my insufferable worth. She disappears into the shadows that breathe and coil like living things. Why? -- Why? Why do you leave me just as fast? Why does it race down with my heart so pressed into silence by the sounds–? Why was it to be a moving string pressing down the cliff that anchors my feet to the very edge–? Godly insavior, it vanishes into the places where light dares not tread. I am a fool for thinking I can choose my own fate. God will choose me an ending worth such pitiful beginnings.
Bared to the side where lush leaf and thick for'st expand, there the sound does arise a fluttering God green rising from bush and lake only aimless feet away. In that black maw, shadows dense and dark cling to gnarled trunks of tree and wood speckled who rise with spectres from the earth, their limbs twisted and ragged, reaching toward one another in tangled siblings of a sealed off sky. I am not part of them, not worth the sun gazing upon, and I never wished to be! I don't dare breathe deeply enough to fill my lungs, not when I am caught between that scream that echoes and the horrified silence that fills the spaces she leaves behind. The bloody clatter is insufferable, the rocky descent deserving of my own body now accompanied by the sounds of the implement that meant to push me to it. The rattling chest of sound, that desperate heave of approval, that stench of feeling only gives me the sensation of her. Resembles her, feeds from her, angers my lonely bones like her. So miserable. Only I could have done that to her.
Only half her heart could have broken hers so badly.
One foot falling harsh onto the uneven ground. That is my gateway, though it feels as though the very earth beneath me might open and swallow me whole. A mockingbird stealing my mother's gift to me, her first earthly kindness ripped from her and given to the voice of the heavens and leaves. It's not fair. It's not fair she gets to go to Hell and leave me behind. Neither of us are where we belong. Neither of us are properly in seams with the correct state of balance of this world. I feel the weight of the trees, their boughs bent low, backs bent, arms motionless await in periled watching, stillness brushed against the golden sky with their brown skin, their slaughter's call like cattle's bell seeping into me tragedy, filling my veins with paralysis, rooting me to the earth stronger than I will myself forward. My hands shake, fingers grazing the drenched bark as I draw near enough to touch it, but I don't dare reach too far, don't dare test the boundaries of this world. Oh, but I do. My God, I do.
A soft sound, the whisper of dry leaves against stone far floating from somewhere beyond the trees deeper where the shadows gather and the light falls. I press forward into it, drawn toward the maw with the terrible certainty that I'll find the source if only I listen, if only I keep moving towards her, but dread gnaws at me with every step. The air around me is godlessly thick, savorily damp, the taste of moss and the earth cloying like the ghost of some sweet clumping flesh that isn't mine. My foot brushes a patch of twisted earth where roots coil and I stumble forth, catching myself on the gnarled skin. I lean into it, forehead pressed against the rough surfaces. My chest heaves, a child's body of mine, idiot's shell betraying me as the sound grows quieter, that guttural shriek transformed into something softer now, a whisper that curls around my ears, that reaches down into the hollow places I cannot even hope to fill.
I close my eyes, and for a moment, all is still.
The forest holds its breath, and so do I.
Then, softly, so softly I almost miss it, I hear her voice again.
"Jesse. My son."
The mechanical rasping, the guttural breath of it. . . I know it is not my mother. Any idiot would know the difference. But, I hope. I hope for her. I hope for her arms around me, and I hope for her body to be my mother once more, to labor, to make herself into any shape for my ease, and hopelessly, I lumber towards her sound. The soft shallow shifts, the wires of moving air wire and slip around my whines in foggy comings, a distant shadow from a sky so close beyond the periphery of my own visions. It is soft. It is a whisper. It is stretched thin across the beams of layered silence, and she sends a tremor crawling up my spine, cold as winter's breath.
"Jesse. . . my son."
My hands are raised, my breath caught in my throat, but there is nothing there to fight. Shadows' breath presses tight against the crunched back of trees. The whisper lingers, curling around me like fingers. My pulse hammers and I fall to the ground for a guiltless moment. Take me, I think to myself. Hold me, I think to myself. But the conscious ache of 'What am I doing?' fills me again, and I rise to face her once more. I take a step backward, then another, drawn by the instinct to retreat, to flee from this nameless mother that knows my sins, that wears my brush's voice like a shroud, my artist incarnating God. My brain is correct. She's gone. She's not coming back. But, I want her to. I want her to hold me again. My God, my heart wants my salvation, my reason to return to me. And return, return, she does.
"Jesse."
My head snaps around, and there in the gloom, a jagged silhouette hunches over, the body of shade stitched together from pieces that do not belong in a world of righteous formalities. She lurches, long limbs bending in, sickening angles serving sides as it sways, its empty eyes locked onto me, hollow sockets that drink in the light. Only in the shadows of crisping leaves does the form slink and shift, blending into the eating darkness that wished it beginning, made from the dusk, it could melt into the bark of shadow and reappear anywhere, everywhere.
Reality is a stumble back, a heel scraping the ground, a body betraying every thought that screams at me to run. But I can't. My legs freeze, trembling beneath me as I stare transfixed into the depths of that monstrous gaze. It twitches, a spasmodic jerk of the shoulders, then stretches one impossibly long limb out toward me, clawed fingers twitching, raking through the space between us with pleasure and gluttonous hunger. The edges of its mouth stretches into something like a grin, wide and empty, a slit of darkness where no human expression would dare belong. The voice rasps, close now, as though it were right beside my ear, murmuring,
"Is. . . that an. . . animal. . .?"
The words mark in me beckoning, and I take a step forward before I even realize I've moved. It is where the branches pull and bow down that I may follow, subservient to the presence that flows through them and I, bending the for'st to its oh-so motherly will, decide to move forward. Dry leaves rustle when something massive is prowling just before me. I feel it inching to me with hobbles, closing the space between us. I can smell it. Mold and rot, an earthy dampness that clings to my skin like the tar and pitch of my mother's hell. It is calming. I feel like I am laying on the ground, staring at the stars when the creature opens its mouth wide, and presses its face into the opening of the clearing.
My brain. . . doesn't fight very much. I feel an ease pressing upon me.
This is what my God wants.
My heart of art feels it on me, lurking on the face, shifting its mass amongst the ground in threes. The thing is right before me, its face inches from my shoulder, yet I can barely make it out, as though my eyes refuse to focus on the full horror of it, the dots, the speckles, the massive things I may call planets in its jaw. Ragged metal claws twitch at shapeless sides, gleams of dull and wet edging out in the forefronts of scant light. It leans forward, maybe seven inches away now, and I catch a glimpse of something red and raw, stitchings of a sprawling wound being opened beneath the mask of shadow and twisted sinew.
"Alicia. Take the children," it whispers at me.
A stabbing pain in my foot detangles me from the trance. My God blesses me with strength for one last moment. I turn and break into lifeless sprint, my feet pounding the earth in determination, but the thing is behind me, to my left, to my right, always just out of view but the eyes, the heavy eyes, they scuttle. They scuttle along me, dragging shape with the rest of the body, limbs twisting and contorting as my mother moves, the sounds of scraping chase, guttural breaths filling all emptiness of air, closing in a claustrophobic sensation around my bones and features. Its laugh, thin and brittle, cracks through the silence in splintered bone, a twisted mockery of human sound that shreds whatever courage I have left. I feel alive and dead again. The trees bend away from me, arching over the path in skeletal arms, their branches clawing at the sky. My breath comes deep in ragged gasps as I try to sprint, but I feel it drawing closer, moving faster, shifting positions with every heartbeat until I can no longer tell where it ends and where the forest begins. My chest tightens, the suffocating weight of it pressing down, the thing in my head already gorging itself on me, filling itself with me, only adding my meat and mass to its malice, its bottomless hunger agleam again. And then, God, a flash of movement to my left in the fire of life I may call this heart of arts. I catch a glimpse of it, split down the middle in a jagged line that could be a grin or a snarl, salivating mouth dripping with something dark and sticky. The roses stare straight into me, through my heart and out my lungs, in the crevices where she sees every part of me it will devour, leaving nothing but a shell, an echo without art.
"Marcus, don't. . . don't run. . . help me!"
The words breathe around me, a screaming whisper coming over me, through me, each syllable dripping with something fearsome. My legs buckle and I stumble, the earth rising to meet me as I fall. I feel my death towering over me, the lure of the maw, a sickening, looming mass that stretches on forever, blotting out the light and swallowing the world around me in fatherless tree.
I look up. Slithering down the massive trunk of an Alerce, inching downward. Writhing, spittling thing, where it stretches, the limbs twist, folding in on themselves as it slides lower, its body contorting around the rough bark like a worm. A flash of jagged, gnashing teeth, broken glass glinting in the stones' dimness. I choke down bile, still scrambling to my feet. My feet kick against the muddy ground, pushing forward, slipping and stumbling as I run. My steps pound in time with the pulse of my ears, deafening and panic pans, a muddy, sloshing mess of skin and sew as I claw my way over roots and down the embankment.
"Please. . . someone help-!"
The trees thin, but the shadows don't lift. The forest stretches on in hollow maze, but, a cabin, half-hidden by thick vines and moss, walls rotting in the damp, its roof sagging, calls out to me with the gaze of a massive door. I throw myself toward it, feeling the beast behind catching up. I won't make it. I won't make it. My feet stamp, my heart hammers, my hands slap with all force they can muster against the door, shoving open the unlocked entrance and forcing myself inside with all the desperation I hold dear. I slam the door shut.
"You will. . . never be. . . alone. . . Auggie!" it screams from somewhere beyond, the voice twisted, garbled, and broken. Another scratch of talons join in, faintly, then another, a chorus of the things yet pour from throat and claw and wears nature's soul in cloak. I try and shut my ears, but it is fruitless. I'm too tired. I don't have the energy.
"Don't. . . leave me here," it begs.
Each voice and slice writhe in addled mind, the fractured cry and half-formed belt claw through thick and thin sanity, my exhaustion eating at all bone and ear. I press my palms against the sides of my head, but the sound seeps in regardless, a slow infection that stains every thought. A guttural scraping purrs along the outside of the door, a cleave that shudders down the wood and murmurs into my ears down their very walls. To my left, there is a massive plank. I turn with a strengthened jolt and slam the heavy slab of wood against the braces of the door.
And then, there is nothing but silence.
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