Black Mass

Short Story - for https://substack.com/@choosefiction

Crisp crunchy crackly consciousness to a fault, calling away this forgotten sub-season of mists, smoke, and half-eaten leaves when the dance of the darkness has consumed the summer solstice into the burning October equinox. The children walk through the piles of plundered leaves amiss the thorns and toadstools lying on the ground. In older places, where there are few people and many corroded steel machines the men straighten their muscles into fervid spasms of delirious activity to gather all that the fields had to offer except the acorn nuts lying near the oak trees. They drive the harvest to a market-garden with whispers of the kill.

The women near the kitchen door prowl as they can fruit and make delicious pies. It is in America which is long ago remembered and equally forgotten in the scars that it left. It is the fevering nightmare of the fall from utter grace.

I move 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 and off-kilter time on all my feet. 一丝不苟. An Unsquare Dance in rounds of do-si-do en harmonique.  It does not reek of Mary-do-you-wanna, the is for other times.

Then I stop and I lie in wait. And coldly wait.

I live in weight for the dusky eye which leaves the daylight blue to turn over the gaze of the world out to the stars and other cold things. I lie in wait for the thrushes to sleep in their nests, for the turtles to hide in their furrows. Because I am like the night, a cold rush of the winter spawned night.

I do not sleep but the heated fetid blistering sun makes it so heavy to move, so very heavy. Thus, I wait for the shadows of the tickets that lay the boundaries between the fields. And then out of the fêted water by merry oak trees: I lumber once the lightness calls in to silence steamed by an inner melting into dreary light.

Then there are two headlights being strangely into the infinite night but bleeding with every paper they strike turning light into heat with each droplet that they transilluminate. I control my body onto the road waiting for when the tires attempt to run over me. Then I will squeeze. And squeeze. Until the tires deflate their endless energy going to nil. And the entire truck stops. Then they will get out to check what has happened to their spinning rotational mass in the zone of twilight.

And I will have them, going first up the boots and then into clean flesh. A flesh that knows little of the weight which is borne upon it. A clean sinew that acts according to the savage garden that wires all commands. By poor on to the errors and openings pouring in the salt-caked flesh which forms out of the bleeding pustules of inner night.

Of course, it is that in our night which I wish to, want to, willing to invade in a dervish cyclical dance. I indeed, I corrupt, I take possession for myself. The tensile adhesion will belong to only me.

Then up through the nervous system where, finally, the host can sense that its time is over. It rattles and lumbers to try and form some distance against the invader which it finally knows that I am. And what I am.

Off in the material world, the truck’s headlights beam into a distance that will never come. Frozen along a road that never passes. It is a bleeding heart in the night with no dreams to spare its unrest was vision along the cobblestone’s eternal.

Up. The deep peroneal nerve slicing away the movement and sensation of the leg. Neuropathy how I love the sound of that word! It is the shame of it – know from knowing from the first that one can’t control one’s reactions or sense of feeling. To realize once that you are a catapult in the dance of death. Even the first sound of the word plums my throat as I gobble it down. It is ecstasy in a pill. Fury in a mantra. My enthusiasm never drains. My passion never diminishes. A hallucination by the feeding.

And then I expel the grease and grime of its passing in the wind. A life caught in gossamer unexploding in its wake.

Then I created sideways to take a detour into the guts to roil a paroxysm giddy: taking the belly by the beast and swallowing it, masticating it until it is a gulp down my endless throat. The men stretch their hands skyward after a vision that leaves them as black pinnacles of the night with starlight. Moon shadows of further not.

The weight eases down my throat because its substance is going to be used, used for the real repast. Now I confront the black mass of what I am truly here for: it is within the brain, and it is of the brain, and it is all of the brain: the memories, the memories, the memories. And when that’s done, I will be a clawed-out mess which is the vomit and the excrement of life itself. Because what is a person but is habits and memories? And I will consume the habits with the nerves. All of the biological folderol is but props on a stage within sufficient lighting to the taste of a dark blank canvas on which we shove the operations of our brain in view.

This is delirium contained in feeding, a derangement shoved into a black box, and irrationality fevered by nakedness and incoherence leaving me weeping and irrational in hysteria.

Each moment that you hold is different strands of sight, of sound, of touch, and all of the different flavors of taste, each one weaving in and out with the others… to make a nuanced wisp of memory.

And each person whom we remember becomes the sum of our feelings for them in the ghost of the memories. That is the to be or not to be.

So now I reach up the throat and up the gullet, to swallow whole the entire person. And leave nothing behind.

Then I crunch the ego. That thing which says that I am all and all is me. That I am all the center of the world pantropically and synchronically embossed on every page.

So that everything that can say I say so though me.

I leave behind a mess so entangled in steel and oil and blood that the living will not see what caused it.

It is the memories of a past in a future time,  the ones we care not to imagine because they walk around in bodies waiting to be taken.