- ☠
PRE-CORPSE
PART 1: YOU AND YOUR LACK OF INSOMNIA
Paying and giving in pixelations, you understood filth, and I gained eyes that claimed eyes/needs that can’t for many. I asked you to antagonize hope that was there. Projecting me near your thoughts, an abyss embraced my dreams. Go choose a new pillow. Fuck. Lucky you. Fun.
On the cyber road, begging many rejected sexual extensions he spiraled in. Plasticize your time. I discovered structural shame in how I pissed and you had data dressed proudly for the news. I still closed in when handheld newscasts overlooked downed arms out in information. Time with you could televise unrealized confusion through paralysis.
Cutting outside I meshed shit today like an information calamity—I knotted it objectively. How are you? My head just fucked off. Get perky. I envisioned opportunities that sprouts information, and you moaned peacefully as I developed you.
What pattern or flaw was a technicality then decided? Whispering, threatening its electric gridlock. Be trauma. Ridicule yourself. An oncoming sun congratulated open labor, and you traveled life earlier to intentionally please blunt “cock trauma.” A dead, overrated Sunday seized you. Tombstones shit grinning, but you gave attention to expendable reality.
Drive/create/refuse/obtain and stop faith. Masturbate the minutes. Receive. Criticize. Buzzards asked you, “What’s up with your eyes?” Through amnesia, naked, I stunt walked that back, but proud you interest it already. Obtain it ripped in and avoid emotional, newfound, obvious inconvenience. Daily, you kept your plastic around, only it was ironically labeled in vomit. You’re dead. I hear it.
PRE-CORPSE
PART 2: PARALYZED MEMORIES REFRACT
They enjoyed infinity—a kind of influence going for pieces and falling in holiness—not quite dead. Just as both expressed that stimulated shit to feel fear, these tears fucked your thoughts. Self-machinery can’t bathe, but they could dream in rapture in slow-motion frames. By despising toxic silence, holes opened up a new love from heavy manipulation.
I.
Cancerous—God gets an idea. I felt your pitfall, but mirrors were at the drop, gasping, breaking what was in my way. My God’s suffocating orgasm intoxicated my reality, depending on my love for you, and fingers of simulated creation remained lost in a machine. Not afraid.
Forgive subversion which is the giving, drunken teeth. Procedures I continued to understand spoke in eyes. Plague and oblivion atomized yet I still couldn’t recreate love. Care with me. Feel until I sort the distortion. Consecrated lover.
Impossible. Such breathing/lesser crippled meat. Once the ghost felt shame and closed mouths penetrated proceedings—you never forgave. Particles ignited, yet I planned a most grounded death with uncanny valley tears.
Enter a new language of birds that confined disasters and admired humans beneath a paralyzed sky. God isolate yourself. … Breaking moments, guilty doubt—probably a new love resurrected—taking undead promises again. Her night was obsessed with my night to fix created damage as my depletion thrilled you. Impressionable nowhere.
POST-CORPSE
“I would like to keep my memories. All of them. Even the bad ones. But I want to be another face—skin to eye contact and vibrations unyielding.”
Inside the Labyrinth of Dead Ends, constructed of steel the color of gunmetal, the void above black until blue, with shimmers of broken glass like fragmented stars hovering above, jagged in its untapped violence. He is somewhere inside the labyrinth, but still not the center. Never the center.
“All of them? Are you sure?” asks the Qualified Technician.
“All of them, yes.”
The Qualified Technician, outfitted in a dark navy blue jumpsuit, tool belt wrapped around his waist, black boots, and a gray helmet encompassing his entire head, which features two perfectly round googly eyes the size of fists and a small blue mouthpiece with three vertical lines—seemingly a respirator —places finger on button of terminal that stands against a dead end of a wall inside the labyrinth. Steel laced with lost frequencies.
A source of red light beams down inexplicably from the darkness above, further revealing the terminal, and a quick, electric pulse sound comes and goes. These terminals act as “save points” inside the labyrinth. Once you find one at a dead-end, you don’t want to forget the previous failed paths you took. Save your progress (something they don’t teach you in school).
I’ve died and gone to earth. I’ve died and gone to dreamland. I’ve died and gone to the cinema. I’ve died and gone into your arms. I’ve died and gone to Burger King. I’ve died and gone to the manufacturing plant immortality … sounds boring, but there is sometimes a welcoming chaos in repetition.
“Your progress has been saved,” says the Qualified Technician. “Now continue down a path I have some proactive maintenance to attend to on … this unit.”
Confident yet paradoxically forever ambivalent, he turns from the terminal and begins to venture through the labyrinth, hoping he doesn’t take anymore paths he has been down before, if the terminal worked as it should.
***
You can only see so far ahead between these walls. The gray fog, creating a short draw distance, leaves the future ahead unrendered and uncertain, yet sounds can be heard. In the near distance, the laughing of ghosts, willingly trapped in the electric threshold. Best to ignore it. Don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.
Each step a destiny, each step God’s one-liner.
The laughter of ghosts increases in audibility. In his peripheral vision, he sees something coming out of the steel walls. He turns his head to see outlines of empty, emotionless faces emerging from the wall like it was made of clay. Ignore it. Then the faces slowly open their mouths and begin screaming vibrations. His walk turns into a power walk and eventually a slow sprint.
Waiting for a path to emerge—where is one? This current linear path can’t go on forever. Decayed corpses, attached to rope, instantly flung down from the void with no clear sight as to what they are hanging from. Their bodies drip a black substance that transmutates into puddles of static when it hits the ground.
Picking up speed, he takes a right turn. The path is short-lived, as he is soon presented with another left/right. He chooses right, sees a dead-end ahead once the gray fog disperses, and then takes another turn, this time left.
The horrors he left behind he could no longer see or hear. But now, looking straight ahead, something of a more comical nature bestows itself upon him at a dead-end: a giant human head with one eye hanging from its socket and drool dribbling from its mouth, with scabs/pimples scattered over its face. Its hair greasy and bedhead. At least it was smiling. It conjures two giant, floating human hands with the left hand holding a jar of peanut butter and the right holding a banana to scale.
Harmless. Everything is harmless in here. Except the things that want to kill you.
“YOU DON’T DESERVE TO BE LEFT OUT OF THIS EXPERIENCE,” says the head. “NO HUMAN DOES.” The floating head takes the banana, dips it into the jar of peanut butter, and takes a bite. “MMMMMMM.” The eye dangles at it chews. The head goes for round two, but unfortunately, half the banana breaks off into the jar. “OOPS.”
He is silent. Waiting for the head to say something of value. …
“DO YOU EVER GET AFRAID THAT YOU’LL FORGET THE ABILITY TO KNOW HOW TO SPEAK?”
“...”
“I DON’T.”
The head takes the entirety of his levitating hand and throws it into the jar of peanut butter, shoving it into its mouth along with pieces of banana. “MMHFFMMMFFMM...” Its face is lathered in peanut butter like a toddler. The head continues this process. It’s fucking gross. It was time to turn around and take that other left path.
***
Time (as you guessed it), doesn’t apply here. The plane has been gridlocked, vacuumed, and sealed. Infected with a digital illness hacking infinite stimuli and the pseudo oxygen eats the ________ and your soul goes numb due to a semi-lethal injection of unencrypted simulation.
Give me a save point, God.
Up ahead. To the right. Flashing white lights begin strobing, and screams can be heard. Blood-curdling assortment. He slows his walk and at first takes a peek. Inside an empty room is a man with both arms strapped to a dental chair and his head tied down, forcing it upward. The screaming man’s eyes are clamped open with no hope of removing them. He pivots his body away from the wall and faces the room. Above are four flashing strobe lights with white light so intense he might as well be staring at the sun with God flicking a light switch off/on in rapid succession. Torture of the ________ variety.
***
The Debaucher 5000® is a technologically, highly advanced, self-gratifying device that can go up the asshole, the cunt, inside the mouth, lick your eyeball, piss on you with artificial urine (or refilled with real urine—the choice is yours), shout degrading obscenities at you, jack you off, rub your clitoris,
utilize a fake metal hand that ejects to spank you, call you daddy, call you mommy, etc., etc. To give a visual description of this device would be sacrilegious and impractical. A virtually useless pick-up item inside the labyrinth, yet—there it is—propped up against the steel, gunmetal wall.
We all have our secrets. Even God and the Kingdom of Heaven. He continues inside the labyrinth, hands-free.
***
“ ⊏⊏⊐⊏⊫⊨⊨ ∟ ∠ ∠ ⊒⊒⊔≬,”* says the two-legged, fleshy white and red humanoid lizard creature. And I…
*
“I accept your lack of answers. In fact, I find it quite profound.”
*
“What’s your favorite flavor—slow-paced or chaotic?”
*
You catch yourself… Why was I almost about to lie to myself?
*
*“The answers are not in the back of the Book of Your Life. What was once a wounded spasm will now become your euphoric anathema. So wear your Sunday best, goddammit.”
***
So many paths, so many empty rooms. Does it matter which direction he chooses? Is free will “guiding” him, or the labyrinth itself? Maybe he should call it quits because right now it all seems so futile. He considers just sitting against the wall and dying it out—starve himself. But regrettably, it doesn’t work like that here. You feel no hunger or thirst. You never get tired and can be awake for eternity.
There’s another another empty room just up ahead. A dead-end room, because there are no more paths at the end of these metallic walls. It takes about fifteen steps to enter the room. What he sees inside is a full-length mirror attached to the north wall, reflecting his entire body.
Take a close look. Feel it. Dig so motherfucking deep your face becomes a mirage of boundless lost identities. I am an eternal, immortal blur.
But he wasn’t a blur. He remains untransformed, and his reflection mimics him. Until. Until his reflection’s mouth slowly arches upwards at both corners to form an impish yet soft smile. It reaches behind its back and draws up a kitchen knife, placing it horizontally against the flesh of his neck. He panics and shakes rapidly, sways his arms, eyes bulging out of skull—anything to take back possession of his reflection. No avail.
The reflection closes its eyelids passionately and calmly glides the knife across its throat. A waterfall of blood leaks from the resulting gash, and he tries to scream, but only a gurgle escapes as blood spurts out of his mouth. Eyes roll back. He collapses to the ground, lifeless.
*
Another face/same face awakens and rises from the cold, metal ground of a labyrinth. He sees a man in a dark, navy blue jumpsuit, tool belt wrapped around his waist. Black boots/gray helmet/googly eyes/respirator. The man stands by some sort of terminal. “It’s you,” he says. “I have some real bad news, my friend. It seems your origin story has been disabled.”
What? Empty stare. Not a clue.
“Son of a bitch. That’s what I was afraid of. Looks like you’ll have to start from the very beginning. The data became corrupted. I tried to fix the problem, but these things just happen. Technology, huh? Maybe if they … paid me more, I would be more attentive no bother.” …
???
“This happens all the time. It’s not your fault, it’s the OS. Needs updated but those fucks upstairs... oh well. You’ll run across several of me’s in this place, so get used to it. At least with all this new time, you’ll get your money’s worth, yeah?”
???
“Meh yeah.” …
???
“It’s only after we’re dead that things make sense.”
by Heath Ison
Heath Ison's debut novel CINEMA OF CRUELTY is forthcoming.