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free fiction issue #6...
TORCH SONG
Five black figures sharpen knives; look my way. Among them something moves like lightning striking the ground. Never there, always there, unrecognisable but... a memory of past horror pursues me on this horrible journey through - who or what am I?
Mishap:
Shower of ice crystals explode in flames driving pylons of zinc and titanium through my skull pan. White heat of shadowed landscapes roll magnanimously, churning up the clouds of passing tornadoes. Lens flare haunting the stalagmite horizon. This is a place I once knew panning slowly left to right like a slow razor blade across the eye. All is desolation, the blackened earth steams in aftermath.
A lamenting horn introduces the five black figures across the jagged surface of my mind. Indefinable shapes, they smell of nostalgia the way rotting, musty books from your childhood bring tears to adult eyes. A shaft of ether bats down upon my shattering plates of reality. The world falls away. The chill radiance scorches away shade after shade from my fractal silhouette, pouring, foaming, black under chrome.
The emptiness of boiling alive in formless abandon. Friction is a blue scream of drowning, soaring through ether forests approaching a new world. The pain is unreal, must not figurize.
Crash Landing:
Regular geometry has resumed in my flesh, I can feel the obtuseness and acuteness, the sharpness of reality bisected by a skittish realm of demons. All about me suddenly a thousand rockets spit into the sky a choking gasoline of industry. Where can these industrialists be going? Why destroy me for their pleasure. I am just a man of colour, red and grey, a living logo. Minimalist to the point of... here comes the first crescendo. I am so high I cannot breathe. I am a living rocket soaring above an unknown world. Explosions and pistons suck the juice from her breast. Pile drive her molten core in a blast furnace mushroom heat of deserts.
Baby island, skin mountains blistering in toxic waste. Eyes aloft as I swoop down for the kill. Three-eyed grimace taunts you from the haze growing in your head like a familiar fear. I do not know what I have unleashed upon the dance of a million oval windows.
Broken Laws:
Infinity symbols of suburbia drives concrete jungles of shimmering combustion. The colours, how could there be so many in one place? Think of the complexity. The layers of reason stacked up in a dockyard awaiting delivery. Always tomorrow. War lines are drawn, eh? Heads up, lads. Delta formation mind set. I want to be on solid ground, not worrying the clouds, not looking back on the Earth from altitude, not merely closing in on pregnant potential for death, not clever clogs of energy unleashed, not boiling napalm of propaganda.
Something concrete beneath my feet.
Closer now but still only floating on choppy waves of desolation. The crooked arm of the Law. Derelict resurrection of silence mid town. Raze the world to its knees, bleeding in the rubble. Men, finally, like me, these wretched victims brushing their teeth in the streets with an old stick. Bring it all down. End the pain. The birds flee Armageddon. Windows shatter and jagged edges race toward your eyes at the speed of Fast Forward. End the tension. Fire now.
Liberty:
All the metal clouds are mine once again. In harbours, in parks, in the centre of town, among friends. I can see the trombones of slowness splitting. Time running on empty, gasping toxic rich vapour. Fog swept longing, acres of pearl reflecting the future, a piercing cry of morbid stillness. There is no way forward from here. Unreason reigns. In the glare of an atomic shadow, the Scatterers.
I watch them in their literal millions eating up the queue, body by body. Thunderous footsteps of curiosity like chiffon, beards and corporate smiles. I cannot breathe in this thick soup of organic hatred. Look at my eyes, they have killed me, I am an empty brainshell. Proud of God Knows What. Watching you. All of you. Lighting up. Turning off. A narrative synergy of extinguished solar identity and streaming white noise panning across the barren cityscape. A blood flow of nuclear traffic.
From nineteen floors up my descending mind is a network of light. Black satin underpaint crackling with a sewer stench. Pacman eating its way across my forebrain, ghost by ghost. This is going far too fast. Soon I will be nothing but a free radical, repeating my intention with biochemical replication. Too many arteries bursting with blood. Will the flow never end?
Every soul is a new day:
But the torture continues unabating ant squirreling of stop go drown resuscitate. A criss-cross of daylight blasted by the argon ad laser. The congestion is just too much from this angle. I am eating testosterone, riddled with it. Blurred by its heat. Confused by its multitude of flavours. Who to follow, who is moving on? A dizzying unpacking of my metal shell, eyes occluding, arms beating out a constant rhythm against the lethal eyespikes. No more, please or thank you. This is bigger than anything went before. It must never stop, the heartbeat of this city. It can never stop. It is an ebbing flowing water torture of repeat plays and bonus games. Must compete. Never stay still.
Until:
The money dries up. The credit is denied. The machinery won’t work for you. Patriots flee for the cover of home. Darkness descends a final time. And I am falling through endless broadcast trying not to catch your eye a blur of rainbow steel. On the ultimate trip. Falling, my gaskets torn open spilling out fuel. Tumbling like autumn cannibalism – death encroaching. Praise the Lord for silent mercy.
The five shrouded figures introduce themselves to me, phaseshift their thoughts onto mine in black layers of silicon ingenuity. Cities of my mind. Future stars growing and dying in the blink of an eye such is the vastness of realisation.
I am the ever swimming silhouette reflection amid these brethren. They accompany me to the ground like faithful servants of my failing sanity. Buses and trains leave the terminus but I am no longer on board. Happy sightseeing tours of the Great Descent. A post apocalypse of hand holding the shrapnel and nowhere to go when the ghosts of time reclaim their rightful trajectory.
Downward:
All systems failing. All promise scattered to the wind. A late seam error ignites and my entire body fills with light. Drowning in light. Irreparable. Falling. Tears of fire engulf me. Lilac flickers terrorise my last moments. In stunned close-up, a man is finally among his friends. The day of purification has arrived.
THE END...
(c) 2005 Mike Philbin (writing as Hertzan Chimera)
