Posts Tagged ‘fiction’

I know things you don’t. Things you can’t. Things you would deny vehemently even if you knew them to be true.

Because of these things I know, I have suffered.

I am going to tell you a story. Before I am done, you will be sorry you heard it. By the time I am done you will most likely begin to doubt everything you thought you knew. Before I am done, you will have trouble resting your head on your pillow at night. By the time I am done, there will be no peace in your bed, between your sheets and blankets or in your head while it rests on your pillow.  Because you will see no reason why it cannot happen to you.

This is not my objective.

Well, maybe it is.

Sorry.

All human beings serve at the pleasure of evil no matter what name they give it.

I know that now.

I feel like I first noticed him by accident.  I didn’t see him as the goddamn devil or anything.  Not at first anyway.  No horns,  no cloven hooves, no bifurcated tongue or stench of brimstone.  He did smell dirty.  Porcine.  I will tell you that before it was all over I was reduced to praying to a God I never believed in.

It was no accident.

Still, in the beginning, I had fun with it.  For awhile.  It’s true, I did. I wasn’t afraid at first.  Not really anyway.  I was cocky.  Dumb.  Cynical.

At first it was like picking a scab or scratching a rash.  I hated it but I liked it.  Savory and sweet.  It’s how evil works.

All this until he stood over my bed one windless night and some sense caused me to open my eyes.  To surface from twilight wandering.  He inhaled with a rattle.  He sucked back ropes and vines of spittle and mucus from his lips and giant teeth.  He dropped an index finger on my sternum and it reeked of dirt and grease and gasoline.  His nails were long, black and mottled.  He said nothing but he looked right at me.  Not through me, but straight at me.  He stank of things rotting and seething in dark places.

He fucking stank.

He sighed then, as though he lamented being so disturbing.  Like he was sorry for just how horrific he was, lit only by the moon breaking through my window behind him.

He paused for a time and vibrated with naked rage over my bed with his finger on my chest.

I was frozen.  Paralyzed. The sliding door to my balcony was open,  and some breeze finally clattered the vertical blinds, bringing the odor of animals.  Pig shit.  He turned and walked away tapping the walls as he went, away from my bed and out my front door. I heard him close it quietly behind him and somehow lock it from outside.  He rapped the walls with his knuckles all the way down the hall and down the stairs to the street exit.

I know because I heard it.  Somehow, I could hear it.

The cancer seduces you and before you know it, you’re complicit.  You are stained all over.  Within the cage of a single season I was neck deep.  I was delivered from sobriety and inebriation into madness.

I slept in my own piss.

Goddamn.