I walked at night.
The air dimmed, streetlamps disappeared, and I traveled by moon’s light.
Under the canopy of trees her light filtered and fell on me. A gauze of clouds covered her face, thickened, then even that light was lost.
In the darkness I cried, “HELP?” and was met with silence. My voice seemed alien to me. I cried again, then stopped. No one would come. The act provided no comfort.
Though I could not see forward I forced myself to walk.
For uncertain minutes I saw nothing, heard nothing. Even my footsteps were lost to me. I only felt I was moving forward, I’d no confirmation from my senses. Just one step, another. Step. Step. My jolting heels told me ground was beneath me. That I felt upright and was breathing told me I was standing and must still be alive, conscious.
Then my left foot sank. I’d stepped on something soft, and it moaned. I shouted and heard a shout! I stepped back, but again my foot met something soft, and heard another shout. I looked down and saw the ground shifting beneath me. A glow came directly from it. I leaned down, closer and closer. In sudden revelation my eyes and mind resolved what was before me: limbs. Human limbs. Bodies. Faces, torsos, legs, arms. My feet, booted, sank into the soft belly of a fat woman who cried and cried. A man crawled over her and grabbed my leg, yelling incomprehensibly, and pulled himself upright on my pants, which strained at my waist. Another set of hands from the opposite side attempted to climb me in similar motion, and my pants tore down their seams. I began to run, but the ground was a treacherous scape, and each step drove a yelp from the human soil. I stumbled, horrified. I fell and found myself sinking, wrapped in bodies and hands, pressing into me, grabbing at me, breathing on me. All around: cacophony. Screaming, laughing, wailing, coughing, babble.
Hands and mouths tore at my clothing until they could only find skin, so they grabbed and rubbed at that too. Flesh pressed against flesh, hands and mouths found every inch of me, and my mind came unmoored. I felt terror, arousal, love, hate, joy, sadness, ecstasy. I pressed my hands into others, my body against others. I smelled flesh and piss and musk and tasted skin and mouth and hair and blood. For a time I could not remember myself. I was completely lost to sensation. My body did as it wished. There was no thinking ahead or back. Reflection yielded no benefits; there was no way to coordinate my body, or make sensation useful in memory.
These moments without time passed and passed. Sensation flowed through me without pause until my face surfaced and I beheld a vault of flesh aglow blocking the sky and I screamed until a foot pressed down directly on my mouth and nose cutting my lip against my teeth and I tasting blood launched my hands upward to catch on their leg and clawed up as they punched and shook at me, sighing as I grabbed their genitals and falling into the tangle of limbs as I sorted myself and found my feet directly under me for the first time I could remember. Other people were walking atop the morass of humans, treading quickly or slowly or carefully each, and a current of limbs followed beneath them, a wake of snapping hands and legs surging in eddies and flows. I followed one of the walkers, thrashing violently at any finger laid on my body, proceeding along a low upward grade until I caught up to them, tried to hail them, but they could not discern my voice from the surrounding din.
I grabbed this walker’s shoulder and they turned their head but refused to stop and I tried to explain myself but they punched me straight in the face and I staggered back and almost fell into the bodies beneath me but they kept walking and I kept following until I outpaced and exceeded them. Suddenly I felt I was being chased, so I sped up. Most of the limbs around me were pulsing in one direction, small branches and breaks all along this tunnel were easily ignored, and I jogged then ran and ran against runners until I took another punch to the head and this time I fell and when I looked down my ankle was jammed at an absurd angle and I screamed but so did someone else and I could not tell mine from theirs and I began to sink and I felt some kind of fear and horror tear everything away from me but there was a lining of relief I abandoned as soon as a woman running by me paused and offered her hand which I took. I limped next to her a while and we punched and kicked at the limbs around us until my ankle improved enough for me to walk and I paused and wrenched an arm from the body of a laughing man beneath me and handed it to this woman who also began wrenching limbs from those around her and we stacked the limbs together making a floor of arms and legs and torsos and heads held together by a mixture of hair and human blood and shit and inside this shelter we laid down and finally had the first moment of rest I could remember.
When we woke I found fingers snaking through the floorlimbs which I hacked at with a sharpened femur. She and I ventured outside with tools of bone and harvested from bodies around us. I fashioned a bed of ribs and humeri and she flayed several people providing skins for clothing and sheets. In this way we fashioned a shelter and furniture. As we laid under sheets of leather we learned to trust each other’s touch. I entered her and felt love in one perfect direction for the first time. In an eruption of passion we screamed and slept and when we woke she was fat and pregnant, stomach swelling at an impossible rate, breasts tumescent and leaking, and with a solid push a child squeezed from inside her into my arms and began chewing on the flesh of my chest and though it hurt it felt correct.
The woman and I had many more children, and they all grew and learned to eat of others’ flesh and eventually left our home and I found I was tired and I found the woman tired and at one point she went to sleep and the arms beneath our floor broke through and pulled her into the soil of men but she never opened her eyes and I knew I was too weak to save her or that she was beyond saving but I grabbed her all the same and almost went under until one of my children reappeared alarmed by my cries and pulled me up and I lashed out and harmed him and he went from me and I found myself alone again in the den of flesh, my walls disappeared, my skin sagging, my legs thin and arms weak. Still I retained a staff of fashioned of bound bones and leathers, sharpened to a point at the end which I used to support and defend myself as I sojourned forward, unwilling to succumb to the tongues and phalanges tickling at my heels.
I walked and walked and found a tunnel breaking off the main path and I figured there was no difference between it and the larger one I’d been following and I wandered down this tunnel and found warmth and I felt nothing save what I’d once felt in the act of consummation. The skins clothing this tunnel glowed more golden than red and I dropped my staff, sensing I did not need it. This tunnel was steep and I gasped deep for breath, but every breath was sweet, and every step full of pleasure. My muscles burned and the burn was love. I worked toward a light at the end of this corridor, brilliant, unignorable. Nothing grabbed at me, I sensed my feet disappearing, my body disappearing, and I floated toward an enormous face made of faces, and a hand made of hands reached toward me and cupped my awareness, I no longer knew my body, and brought me toward its mouth of mouths which opened and uttered one perfect syllable before placing me on its tongue of tongues and swallowing me and everything was dark again.
After an unknowable length of time I became aware of my feet, and that I was walking under a dark sky. The moon shone overhead and streetlamps winked into view ahead of me. I was pacing forward without any thought.
I returned to my home, opened the front door, entered, closed it, scratched my dog. My wife ate leftover steak on sourdough toast with a nice gruyere, sitting before our projector. A film played. Something raucous, a mixture of tears and laughter. I sat next to her and smelled her shampoo. The dog jumped on my lap and I fell asleep against her shoulder. I did not dream.
-11.07.2021
