Chapter Text
Maybe there was salvation next to a water pipe, or a breath of freedom in the sway of a lizard’s tail amidst the cement. Maybe, I’d reckon, there was a way of escaping the day’s imminent sunlight. Maybe, I thought, I’d be able to hide — just for a moment, a second, for a glimpse of an old dog’s heartbeat, to disappear, disembody, and cease to exist. Just for one, one miserable fucking instant. I never was actually able to, although my name has no importance to the narrative; my existence is wretched, spoiled, and has been rotting in my mother’s womb like a stillborn ever since I showed signs of it. My body is a beehive filled with little slithering half-corpses. My dear, dear existence. Mine.
The crescent in the night sky threatened to swallow the neighbouring star. I was looking up from the old pier, lying on the wet wood overgrown with algae, thinking.
A fly flew by.
A car rode past, illuminating the vast black stillness of the lake.
A pine branch swayed over my head and inside my stomach. I trembled, then rolled over on the side. The old coat I wore shifted, causing goosebumps to scatter over my cold skin. The boat was still there, still intact. It stood on the gentle, unnoticeable waves, as if ready to accept a firm hand on the oars and quietly drift away from the pier, into a new, unknown horizon. But the gaping hole in the hull filled it with water, and it had sunk to the bed of the lake where it was shallower. Tadpoles swam happily around the seat and the storage compartment was filled with other eggs and waterlily roots. Irreversible, irreversible damage.
I looked at it for a while, letting the thoughts settle down around the vision. It could be any day the old boat finally gave in to old age and the imminent state of decay I condemned it to. “I built you,” I said soundlessly, “and I shall let you destroy yourself; watching and thinking.” I felt as though I stood by its deathbed, listening to its shallow breathing. It’s only now I saw the oars had been corroded — and my own hands bore the very same wounds. Have I, too, been built to freely drift into the open horizon, but am to be destroyed by intactness? By arrest? By halt?
I got up from the pier and shook the dirt off the sleeves of the coat.
I took a breath. I ran into the woods.
My hour hasn’t come yet, and when it does — I’ll accept it as it is. I’ll drift into her loving arms and drown then; but not now. I don’t think I could stand being halted. I don’t think I could stand rotting at someone else’s will. I don’t think I’ll ever give away the sacred privilege of letting the self dissipate by no other hand but mine.
For my fifteenth birthday I slept in. The pine branches in my stomach calmed down when I knew I didn’t have to move. It felt alright, knowing the monstrous vermin did belong in bed that morning.
Only once did I turn around to see what time it was. It wasn’t morning at all — the clock showed stably four. When I went downstairs to fetch some coffee, I noticed the front door was ajar. It wasn’t uncommon for it to be — they’re hypochondriacs with a compulsive thing, and they like the house aired through by whatever means necessary; however, I did trip and stumble over a turned over pot with sticky spilled stew, its meaty brown bowels spread out on the blue carpet. That was new. I hopped to the right and hit another pot, this time empty, which fell down from the counter with a loud clang. That was even stranger; they never left clean dishes to hang around, much less giant ones like these.
I went back up and placed the cup on a book. It was Abbott’s Flatland, which made me feel uneasy. It left its black-covered twins from the shelf and was lying with the first page open. The old language welcomed. The words pulsated like a Pacman screen. Next to it was a stack of squared papers, and in every square there was a number neatly written to fill the borders. There were two old textbooks and a Kafka tome. There was a quill and an ink pot which glistened in the evening sun. There was an unfinished letter to someone unknown. There was a skull. A replica, sure, but it was there nonetheless, gaping at the blank walls with its absent eyes. I used to have a thought that it might be smiling at me; but then again, for that you’d have to have lips. I had lip tint, which would have made the interaction easier, and yet the touch of the plastic bone, a reminiscence of a dead girl with a Roman nose, the feel of her teeth under my fingers told me more and less than I could handle. I didn’t pick her up ever since, which I regret doing, for she’s filled with much dust since the last time I did. I still talk to her sometimes; she isn’t going to listen, and I can have my peace of mind that she won’t snitch or tell on me, for that she’d have to have at least a resemblance of skin.
A spider crawled on the strings of the guitar, and they twinkled, gently. It was time I picked it up, too; but I was too conscious to try; detachment was truly key.
The radio mumbled something about the soviets, the war, and chess; I adjusted the volume; an ecstatic voice announced the victory of Kasparov over Karpov. The coffee was too hot, and I spit it out with a slam on the table.
Of course, there was some shouting over the disemboweled stew. A charwoman spilled it, and, before she could make another, something made her run; hence the shouting. Doors banging, wall punching, glass breaking, name-calling. The latter has always been the worst; they’d always throw in some of the vilest, foulest, most repulsive names to call each other. I was called down a few times to clean the blue carpet, but a vermin’s a vermin for a reason. It is not in its slothful and blood-sucking nature to abjectly obey the host, but to motionlessly lie and stare at the overcast skies, and listen to the raindrops prop on the tin roof. It is in its spineless nature to shamelessly lie and stare into good men’s eyes, and listen to the raindrops prop on the tin roof. It is, surely, in its sordid nature to mercilessly, when he least expects it, lay its hands on the host, the wife, the child, the child, it is, after all, in its spineless nature to break a spine, even its own if needed, it’s in the nature of the vermin to mock its creators, it surely is in its nature to puncture another hole in the hole-drilled wall, it’s in its nature to violently kick chairs, turn tables, break faience knives and bottled wines, it’s in its nature to claim the knife from the cork and jolt it into a crucifix, it’s in its nature to mock God and stand in His presence in a blasphemous epiphany and smile, and it is surely in the vermin’s nature to bite into His son’s head and break its teeth on the fragile porcelain of his body and to let the blood stain its fingers as it cradles the beheaded and mourns the living.
It is in the vermin’s nature to soundlessly walk out the door and leave it ajar. To glide through the woods, letting the branches scratch at its bare feet as they sink into the wet earth underneath. To sense the sweet and sour smell of decaying trees and rotten fruit, to feel the gentle wind wipe away the vermin’s tears. To see nothing but darkness amongst the red and orange leaves which lead to the lake. To touch the boat with blood-soaked hands and let them slip into the icily cold water, and to let its whole body immerse itself into it, to sink to the bed but moments after to reemerge as though it were some unfortunate corpse. To taste an ebbing metal warmness between its teeth, and to chew the holy gritty porcelain.
And it was, of course, in the vermin’s nature to hear its own wretched heart pound in its eardrums, and to listen to the raindrops prop on the tin roof of its empty skull.