I have real problems
I might write more of this, I might not. I don't know what the point of it is, don't know where it's going. Just... what the fuck?
Even at one mile straight into the sky, the smell of flesh was as potent as if I was cooking someone in my own kitchen. When the seal split it had clapped so loud that now, hours later, I didn’t even realize he was calling me.
“Dad…”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to speak up, Richard. Sound doesn’t travel so well at this altitude.”
--Perhaps this would be better? he asked, the words simply entering my head without a voice.
“Much.”
--What?
--I said, “much.”
Where have all the screams gone, I wondered. I hadn’t meant for it to be that easy. I wanted the combustion to stretch for at least a day, a good slow burn to give them enough time to go through all the stages of coping with death. The fire was already dying down, and I could even see patches of scorched earth where there had once been swimming flames steadily building from within all that was life. Some of them had probably even died without realizing that there was more to life than the touch.
--I had to try, didn’t I?
--I’ve never discouraged you from following your heart. If it’s what you think you had to do, I certainly don’t hold anything against you. Don’t take it the wrong way if I say that I’m just glad you didn’t succeed.
--If there was even a chance.
--There wasn’t. That’s what I don’t understand. You knew perfectly well that time happens because it’s supposed to.
--Well it’s a little hard to be sure when there’s always someone like you around, fulfilling prophecies like it was your fucking idea or something. Like you have power.
I turned and smiled at him as best I could.
--Are you really trying to measure dicks with me over the Apocalypse? Ah, the hormones of youth… Perhaps I should’ve listened to your mother and had you castrated.
--It’s almost certainly a moot question now.
--Aren’t they all? That’s the beautiful thing. A whole new set of concerns. Are you done bleeding?
--No idea, I turned off my nervous receptors when you opened me.
Even though there was almost no air we were moving so quickly in this partial orbit that the faint amount there was caused the slits I’d put in him to kind of flap in the breeze. Twelve of them ran the length of his body, head to foot, and I felt a twinge of guilt about it because he’d been such a good-looking boy. Very fit from swimming, I’d always been proud and somewhat envious of how tightly his skin seemed molded to his musculature, but now it all hung loose and away from him. He looked like a set of Venetian blinds. I sucked him towards me and examined his feet. They were caked solid with dried blood, which was not news, but there didn’t appear to be any recent streams of it whatsoever. Perhaps that’s where I went wrong-maybe I bled him too fast.
--Rich, are you a hemophiliac by any chance?
--I don’t think so, but I bet I know how it feels to be one.
--Oh, stop your complaining, we all had to make sacrifices.
--No, we all had to make sacrifices. What did you sacrifice, exactly?
--Well, your mother, for one.
I was so surprised to see him flinch and shudder at that. In the face of all this, could he really still be sensitive to the memory of a woman who he never even met?
--Wasn’t that really more her sacrifice?
--I suppose you have a point, but technically I’m the one who performed The Sacrifice. It was the happiest day of our lives. I only wish she could’ve seen you. An honest-to-goodness Resurrected Birth. To extract yourself from within a corpse… that’s when I knew that it was really all true, when you popped your cute little head (except for the eyes, of course) out of her and didn’t even cry.
--Can’t cry when you don’t have eyes.
--Hey, that’d be a good lyric.
Even at one mile straight into the sky, the smell of flesh was as potent as if I was cooking someone in my own kitchen. When the seal split it had clapped so loud that now, hours later, I didn’t even realize he was calling me.
“Dad…”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to speak up, Richard. Sound doesn’t travel so well at this altitude.”
--Perhaps this would be better? he asked, the words simply entering my head without a voice.
“Much.”
--What?
--I said, “much.”
Where have all the screams gone, I wondered. I hadn’t meant for it to be that easy. I wanted the combustion to stretch for at least a day, a good slow burn to give them enough time to go through all the stages of coping with death. The fire was already dying down, and I could even see patches of scorched earth where there had once been swimming flames steadily building from within all that was life. Some of them had probably even died without realizing that there was more to life than the touch.
--I had to try, didn’t I?
--I’ve never discouraged you from following your heart. If it’s what you think you had to do, I certainly don’t hold anything against you. Don’t take it the wrong way if I say that I’m just glad you didn’t succeed.
--If there was even a chance.
--There wasn’t. That’s what I don’t understand. You knew perfectly well that time happens because it’s supposed to.
--Well it’s a little hard to be sure when there’s always someone like you around, fulfilling prophecies like it was your fucking idea or something. Like you have power.
I turned and smiled at him as best I could.
--Are you really trying to measure dicks with me over the Apocalypse? Ah, the hormones of youth… Perhaps I should’ve listened to your mother and had you castrated.
--It’s almost certainly a moot question now.
--Aren’t they all? That’s the beautiful thing. A whole new set of concerns. Are you done bleeding?
--No idea, I turned off my nervous receptors when you opened me.
Even though there was almost no air we were moving so quickly in this partial orbit that the faint amount there was caused the slits I’d put in him to kind of flap in the breeze. Twelve of them ran the length of his body, head to foot, and I felt a twinge of guilt about it because he’d been such a good-looking boy. Very fit from swimming, I’d always been proud and somewhat envious of how tightly his skin seemed molded to his musculature, but now it all hung loose and away from him. He looked like a set of Venetian blinds. I sucked him towards me and examined his feet. They were caked solid with dried blood, which was not news, but there didn’t appear to be any recent streams of it whatsoever. Perhaps that’s where I went wrong-maybe I bled him too fast.
--Rich, are you a hemophiliac by any chance?
--I don’t think so, but I bet I know how it feels to be one.
--Oh, stop your complaining, we all had to make sacrifices.
--No, we all had to make sacrifices. What did you sacrifice, exactly?
--Well, your mother, for one.
I was so surprised to see him flinch and shudder at that. In the face of all this, could he really still be sensitive to the memory of a woman who he never even met?
--Wasn’t that really more her sacrifice?
--I suppose you have a point, but technically I’m the one who performed The Sacrifice. It was the happiest day of our lives. I only wish she could’ve seen you. An honest-to-goodness Resurrected Birth. To extract yourself from within a corpse… that’s when I knew that it was really all true, when you popped your cute little head (except for the eyes, of course) out of her and didn’t even cry.
--Can’t cry when you don’t have eyes.
--Hey, that’d be a good lyric.