One.
She got up reluctantly and reached for the blinds. Black ink flowed from the heavy fabric and all was black.
There was a heavy click and her eyes started glowing wildly. The light at first stayed within the irises, beating furiously around the contour, desperately trying to push the protuberant circle mercilessly feeding luminous flounces to the perfect shape. A tiny stream gashed out, silky white ovals, down the lashes onto the cachectical ochre, all the way over her dress, carefully eluding hair, each strand sharply accented.
The stream of light filled her body and dress with familiar colors, moved on to the chair and rested. It contemplated painting the room, but decided there’s no need, for it would only divert one’s attention.
Me, I didn’t mind for I wasn’t even there.
Precipitantly I would’ve fallen to my knees and crawled to the wall, carefully reaching for the other end of the room, feeling her smile entering the occipital genre of the unbearable scratch on the back of neck. But as soon as I would put my hands back the wall is gone and so is the room and the light and the woman in the chair.
I stepped outside my apartment, said hello to a neighbor and stumbled down the stairs, away from the suffocating smradness of 50 or 60 slabs of carpetbagged faces. A few dozen stairs. They walked out of their rooms, merging together, growing fatter and wider with each teabag and lump of sugar, their sordid pores oozing lard and perfume. I could no longer tell apart the orifices of the adipic round mass that was following me. It stuck dead at the door and I was free to smell the odorless.
I walked away from the door, an iris following me through the crack by the lock until the rusty latch came between us. It stayed proud and free in its dumb eternal repose.
Apart from the streetlight across my building it was pitch black. Hand stretched, poor suggestions of the shape expected. I kept walking and the smell started growing faint. In a few minutes I stood still and breathed in. I couldn’t describe the air as ‘pure,’ it felt as if there was no air at all. I touched my fingers and felt no response in my nerves. The building was so far that the lights could no longer reach me. I sat down and felt my last senses abandoning me, I wasn’t sitting on anything, neither I was floating in space.
Then her eyes appeared again and I could almost make out a smile. To prove me wrong she unraveled her face, stale and stolid and I smiled in return. She followed any angle dead-centered and silent. I closed my eyes and saw her sitting before me, same posture. I couldn’t tell if she stayed inside my iris or if I my eyelids lost their nerves. I wondered if she could see me or if I was an odd tangle of insecure impulses dancing around the void.
“Can you please fall asleep already, she said. I’ve missed two calls.”
Two.
The tongue, stung and swollen wobbled ferociously across the cavity, tearing apart the syllables into a swarm of miniature broken hummingbirds tumbling down my shirt. They made ugly little sounds like that of frozen casing or a stuck-up mortice chisel, tiny, tiny, times thousand!
They beat me up, all ten of me tied up and tortured and tied up again until the whole congregation resembled a giant masochistic silkworm. The ropes kept coming until there was no room in the basement. They left carefully tripping over and laughing, their contact miles of cords away from my nerves. And then they left and it was quiet.
I lay there for hours and days and years and sank cubic miles deeper into the room. I lost track of all perception and eventually ended outside the room, its sharp corners tickling my ribs somewhere between the 3rd and the 4th of the left.
They came back surprised to see me absent and I laughed at them.
I couldn’t see them of course, but their moans and cries resonated through my bones, merged with the ropes, reaching towards my ears and giving me an almost erotic pleasure.
I imagined their horror, trapped in a box, four of them, the pinhead most likely to kill first. Then there’s rape and abuse if they live long enough to dedicate their last days to such lowly pastime.
The ropes by now took a good deal of my blood and it flowed through their muscles swiftly. I no longer thought of them as former constrains, even though they never bothered to apologized. If they did, I would surely forgive them, for now our roles have changed and it was me on the outside enjoying the spectacle of my insides.
Then came the violence.
It was of course most gruesome and disturbing so I turned away and fell asleep.
Three.
In the hollow glow of the oiled pasocone shines the barrel of the sea, swelled up in washed-out oysters in speedos. The man swings her limbs across and they travel to the next postcard, a sea of nauseous green, sprawled acrover the horizon, tentacles reaching for the shore. She hurls a seashell into the gaping foamy mouth and he stares deeper into the pasocone. The postcard stays and the foreign lights start dancing . They ask to join and float into the Caspian Void. They child drifts ashore, bucketful of sandy tears clenched in fingerscrattchedd. The blanket featherweighted by the patacone marks a single doom buoy, the child sits. He reaches for the glowing silk of the pasocone and put it to her ear. A stranger enters the canal and makes his way to the control room. Inside, it's dark, so he lights a candle and screens the flame with his hand. "When the inside and outside reach a single hue, all shall be revealed." The child nods and listens. Hats off, the void comes whole and blankets the plaid and the shell and the flesh and the alluvium. And then there is nothing.
