A FLY MEDITATING INSIDE THE LIMINAL PRISM
I don’t know who I am nor where I come from.
w h a t ‘ s t h e p o i n t o f y o u
❒A single fly is meditating inside a liminal prism existing in outer space. Or the void. Or a void in outer space. Or maybe it’s a black hole? Doesn’t matter. It is devoid of life and completely “sterile.” Maybe that’s why the fly chose this eternal transitional domain to practice its peace of mind. Only orderly disorder permeates here. God’s laws can’t function here.
→~>
A somnambulist started a cult. They spread constellations across the open sky and purified liquids into seasonal vertices. They were trained to inject the numb into memories—sometimes with pinpoint accuracy—yet failure was still a possibility. They possessed the ability to infiltrate dreams/memories, making alterations to remember to forget. If summoned correctly, they could conjure an infinity vacuum to suck the moment dry.
“Susceptible—valuable sustenance. A person. They are confounded,” said the somnambulist cult leader, sleep-talking, of course.
“Still, it doesn’t seem to align with the principles and ethical motive of The Ones That Came Before Us, master,” replied the second-in-command. (He didn’t know his leader’s name because his worshipfulness was always too sleepy to tell him.)
“But imagine the unprocessed archon fecal we can collect, and think about the children. Selfish, all too selfish, like the eyes of an animatronic lecher ready to commit themselves to a futile, silent but violent, suicide. Already it smells like a perfect triumph. I recommend we quickly gestalt our ambitions and exploit our mark to full capacity. No human’s reality is worth sacrificing the ideology and immortal code of The Ones That Came Before Us.”
“ ?” …
“Obliterate the binary mode of structure. A beyond god-like atavistic resurgence!”
“ ?” …
“Go eat shit already.”
<~←
❒He was somewhere he knew he wasn’t supposed to be. The other day, he had left the doctor’s office—Dr. Weepskaller, wasn’t it?—but the diagnosis remained unchanged. He suffered from a deficiency in neuroplasticity, perpetually caught in a state of waiting, never knowing, never adapting. All he had were infantile dreams and childhood.
Asleep or awake, it didn’t make a difference. He found himself inside the liminal prism, with the only occupant being a single fly, hovering about six feet above the ground in the center of the prism. Was it alive? Why was it there? Nevertheless, he walked forward.
The walls appeared transparent, resembling liquid glass that shifted with glares of ectoplasm in indigos and purples, whites and blues. His visual field seemed grainy, but he was uncertain if it was his eyes or the prism itself. Outside the prism, there was nothing but blackness, with what could have been stars off in the distance. From an unknown source came a hum (theta wave frequency 4-7 Hz) sound which vibrated throughout his body. The floor, also transparent, gave the impression that one could fall into endless nothingness as he walked forward looking, glancing down.
Position: un/occupied. A boundless threshold.
He was only a few feet from the fly. Motionless fly. Closer closer … …
His sentimentality couldn’t be tamed. It was sucked in like a vortex into his brain. He never wanted to move forward, see anything new. Only the old, the accustomed, the melancholic tragedies and joys. Being in the prism increased this feeling a hundredfold, yet he couldn’t deny the presence of the fly. What was its source?
Ethereal. Have I been here before? A constant fleeting of transmissions censoring, redacting my thoughts. An amalgam of sensory overload yet numbed senses persist side-by-side to them.
→~>
“The fly is reaching gnosis,” spoke the somnambulist … to himself. “His mode isn’t material anymore—too many eyes, too many voices. It has been tattered by oversaturation and fetishized monomania. What was once yours isn’t anymore. A new psychic-universal, unconscious region will be installed.”
The somnambulist continued to eat static and white noise as an appetizer.
<~←
❒Fleeting fleeting Face to dipterous face with the fly. … …
Faced the fly, an unexpected voice. It rumbled. Deep. Reverberating. With a scratchy edge layered on top and hums and hisses like an old audio cassette tape that had layered memories re-recorded over on top of one another. “You're not supposed to be here. This place wasn’t designed for you to see.”
He said nothing. He blinked. And when his eyelids opened he had perceptively been teleported back to the initial location within the prism where he had arrived. But the fly, once in the center of the prism, had been replaced with a mattress suffused with blood.
I see it: A glass mattress with a white sheet splattered in blood, crimson cascading off its edges like waterfall. The glass mattress is levitating in front of me nearly eight feet off the ground. A pseudo gravity attains the unattainable and I feel it. A paralyzed connection to the aether-realm. And I see it.
The blood struck the floor of the prism, and he could hear it splatter. He walked forward again, just as he had before with the fly, not knowing why, yet undeniably drawn to it and overtly fixated.
“I killed it. I killed your reminiscent empty corpse. I killed it in the “to be world” and consumed your virtual flesh. Pixelating surrogate, untethered from any reality, dispersing dust into sacrificial womb. Brain limb amputated/subcortical fixed stained maps of phantom circuits surrounding being.”
He remained silent. He blinked. And when his eyelids opened he had perceptively been teleported, again, back to the original area of the prism where he had arrived. But the mattress had been replaced with a shadow person lustrous with reflective black.
I am lost.
“But you like it.”
Can hear my thoughts?
“Why would you not be able to hear your own thoughts?”
Me/I.
He didn’t approach the center of the prism this time, timid. It wasn’t until the shadow person, its body oriented towards him, gestured his hand to wave him forward in a blur of slow motion. He abided. The shadow person, apparently a tangible variant, opened its palm to reveal to him a gun-metal rectangular device four inches in length. With its other hand it took an index finger and thumb, reached for its face where an eye should be, and pulled out a jagged, blue crystal. It crushed the crystal with a closed fist, sprinkling the resulting powder into one end of the device.
Fleeting transmissions…
The shadow person inserted the device into its “mouth,” applied pressure to a small silver button, and took a deep inhalation. You could hear its lungs, all consuming. Shadow person exhaled the vapor onto his face. Smell of metal and fruity soiled montaged breeze of provincial angst and mildew. The shadow person then offered for him to take a hit. He obliged and didn’t want to know if he had a choice.
Suck...suck..breeeeeeeeeeath out…
Drifting, floating, white/blue flamed orbs began to ghostly solidify inside the prism. Vegetation sprouted on the walls and ceilings in an array of vibrant colors. A sensuous overload of past, present, and past convulsed electrical neurons.
Footsteps echoing behind … he turned around.
Some unrecognizable yet familiar young man held a VHS camcorder up to his eye, silently recording him, capturing him on real unreal time. Forever a life manifest as unwanted gods and future molded dissipation.
He turned his body back to the shadow person. Something had changed. He could faintly make out his own reflection on the shadow person’s surface, which grew less obscured each passing moment until it had became him. He now stared at a nude bodily duplication of himself. Himself lifted sides of mouth into an unwelcoming and hauntingly sardonic grin.
...fleeting transmissions. Vis- -vis à . In the flesh/out of flesh. Naked psychoneurotic teeth to consider sinking into me.
Another copy of himself walked out of himself—, like a liquid portal of pseudo-flesh. The sequence continued, and more of himself multiplied and emerged from one another. He glanced back at the unnamed camera man, who continued to exhibit a professionalism of “the show must go on.” One copy of himself had in his hand a knife, walked up behind the cameraman and, in slow motion, slit his throat. The cameraman gurgled, dying, (but like a professional).
He kept multiplying (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ), and the fear had came, out of … nowhere, as if it had been suppressed throughout his entire duration within the prism and was now breaking free. Terror.
The prism began to shake, and the vibrations increased—A god-quake to shake off the flesh. The other hims started to explode from all around his position. Imitative, dark, gray, carbon blood splashed and sprayed—dissolved the vegetation like acid turning beauty to decay. It was below his shoes, the “blood,” and it was sentient. It encased his feet and seeped up to his legs. He
was becoming infused with the prism. He was in pain and tried to scream but his mouth wouldn’t allow him as the “blood” had made its way up to his chin and into his mouth.
The prism ceased to be a soft, transparent, glass hue, instead a metal, machination of pain and suffering. The panels of the walls began to fold into one another. Out/in/sideways/outways. It had transformed, along with him as host, into a colossal mecha war machine. He found himself bound inside it with no control. He could only see through the visor of the mecha’s head as it hurtled into hyperspace, stars streaking by in chaotic blur.
→~>
The somnambulist contemplated. But not for very long.
<~←
It exited hyperspace and the mecha was out in normal space (this must had been the demiurge created Milky Way), and floated idly, allowing its powerless host to take a moment to look outside the visor of its robotic head. It wanted him to look at Earth. There it was. What day was it on there? Where he lived
at least. No matter. The mecha raised its mechanical cannon arm, and targeted its planet killing super-omega death-ray at his home planet.
No, no—wait, “Don’t!”
A red beam fired out of the mecha’s cannon. Mother Earth exploded in all her glory. That Motherfucking Earth.
INT. BEDROOM – MORNING
We see him in bed and he is sleeping and/or dead to the audience. The morning seems like an impenetrable phase. The camera slowly zooms in towards his ear and we hear a faint buzzing. Camera comes to a close-up of his ear, and a single fly crawls out from inside it. It flies away but the shot remains on our protagonist’s ear for a few seconds until we see a tiny stream of blood roll out and down the lobe of his ear.
FADES TO BLACK
by Heath Ison
Heath Ison is inside The GENESIS of USELESSNESS. His poetry/short story collection ANTI-GRIP (Plastic/Other, 2020) is now available. He is on Twitter @h33thison.