Dream of a Slaughterhouse Drain
The sound of clockwork counting second by second pushes through thickening time until, coated and fatigued by the liquid years, it becomes a metronome of red droplets.
One second, perhaps a year, of time falls past my eyes.
Another year passes when my eyes shut and open again, hearing a mote of a lifetime ending in some darker place, with only short echoes for an epitaph.
"That is your name," she hisses at my ear.
A grid of sickly light filters in from above. Beyond these prison bars, I can see nothing, except the uneven tiles of the floor, stained and crooked like ancient blackened teeth. The air is thick with scents, moss green and crimson; my pores breathe in rust, menstruation, algae and musk.
I stand with something cold pressed against me from behind, a reptile slowly inhaling, distilling and exhaling the sensual miasma around me.
I know her name, just as she knows mine.
I realize that her silence has only been hibernation, not the death I'd hoped for her. Every time, she eats her way out again, each time her teeth stronger and sharper.
Now, her ghostly body sings with malignance. No longer a waif, her starvation is what gives her strength.
She steps around me, close, like floating cobwebs, cadaver body naked and splattered with something thick and dark. Her vulpine face twists her lips in a hyena's grin, and her eyes are lover's eyes, poisoned by green light.
One wiry hand fastens on to mine, and I follow her (again, and again, and again) into the humid darkness.
The light fades into the sound of a thousand clocks, ratcheting away in the void, a symphony siphoning away moment after moment, measuring and trapping each wasted second of time in a pendulum and gear trap.
"Here," she says in an eager tone, and I feel as if a thousand roaches crawl over my skin. I feel emptiness before me, a sense of blind space, and below me I hear droplets. As my eyes adjust to shafts of ruddy light from far above, stinging from the uneasy air, I realize the motion far below.
Half-shaped, half-eaten, twisted like the clay of a frustrated sculptor, skinned and raw, they tangle feebly over each other like crippled salamanders, mute save for the constant attempts at breath.
"Here you are, your name over and over again. What do you think happens to you, when you remake yourself? When you cast aside something within? When you fail? These are your carcasses."
Every one of them is familiar to me. My heart squirms to escape the view, but I can only stare, transfixed by my own admission of guilt.
I have made these things, these abortions.
"You have made me," she answers. "But I am perfect. I have never failed you, and your failures have made me. Now you can but fail."
I watch a droplet from above, plummeting through the damp depths of the pit, and as it disappears into the stripped meat of despair below, I wonder which year it was that I lost.
One second, perhaps a year, of time falls past my eyes.
Another year passes when my eyes shut and open again, hearing a mote of a lifetime ending in some darker place, with only short echoes for an epitaph.
"That is your name," she hisses at my ear.
A grid of sickly light filters in from above. Beyond these prison bars, I can see nothing, except the uneven tiles of the floor, stained and crooked like ancient blackened teeth. The air is thick with scents, moss green and crimson; my pores breathe in rust, menstruation, algae and musk.
I stand with something cold pressed against me from behind, a reptile slowly inhaling, distilling and exhaling the sensual miasma around me.
I know her name, just as she knows mine.
I realize that her silence has only been hibernation, not the death I'd hoped for her. Every time, she eats her way out again, each time her teeth stronger and sharper.
Now, her ghostly body sings with malignance. No longer a waif, her starvation is what gives her strength.
She steps around me, close, like floating cobwebs, cadaver body naked and splattered with something thick and dark. Her vulpine face twists her lips in a hyena's grin, and her eyes are lover's eyes, poisoned by green light.
One wiry hand fastens on to mine, and I follow her (again, and again, and again) into the humid darkness.
The light fades into the sound of a thousand clocks, ratcheting away in the void, a symphony siphoning away moment after moment, measuring and trapping each wasted second of time in a pendulum and gear trap.
"Here," she says in an eager tone, and I feel as if a thousand roaches crawl over my skin. I feel emptiness before me, a sense of blind space, and below me I hear droplets. As my eyes adjust to shafts of ruddy light from far above, stinging from the uneasy air, I realize the motion far below.
Half-shaped, half-eaten, twisted like the clay of a frustrated sculptor, skinned and raw, they tangle feebly over each other like crippled salamanders, mute save for the constant attempts at breath.
"Here you are, your name over and over again. What do you think happens to you, when you remake yourself? When you cast aside something within? When you fail? These are your carcasses."
Every one of them is familiar to me. My heart squirms to escape the view, but I can only stare, transfixed by my own admission of guilt.
I have made these things, these abortions.
"You have made me," she answers. "But I am perfect. I have never failed you, and your failures have made me. Now you can but fail."
I watch a droplet from above, plummeting through the damp depths of the pit, and as it disappears into the stripped meat of despair below, I wonder which year it was that I lost.