Misericordia

His eyes glazed over all, leaving no trails and taking nothing. The raw jelly stung with the air around him and the flimsy lids opened only with viscous trepidation. He felt like he was looking out of hamburger meat. He had seen too much beauty.

He was slow, so slow.

Black tarry muck sucked at each foot as it left the ground, so reluctant to let him leave it was forever threatening to bring him slamming back down for a final joining. He trudged with utter care, delaying meticulously that moment he longed for. When he looked, stopped and looked carefully, he could see that there was no muck but concrete. Regular concrete segments and faded-paint walkways and occasional grass. But that made no difference.

Not to the thing that chased him.

His hands were quick, cutting themselves on the rusty parts in his bag. He muttered small incantations, beseeching for time and promising success. His hands rose, shaky with loss of blood and loss of nerve. He blasted the creature. It flung apart mundanely into dozens of pieces, slowly amalgamating. He let his contraption fall apart in a similar manner, not breaking his limp as he continued on.

He hummed as he left, small animal noises. No melody, no music. He fucking hated music. It was a friction burn to him, the notes that had chafed him abraded and open.

The crawling dark was around the corner in an alley. His facade was broken. There was no time to go back, no time to fling an answer at it. He had been found out. He pulled out a piece of blued iron, beautiful in its craft and exquisite in its purpose. He put the barrel between his teeth, and smiled.

He leaned against a tree upon waking, rough bark scratching at him as the sun burned him, no shade to be found. There were shadows in the distance, though, and they were moving. “The dead know only one thing. The dead know only one thing. The dead know only one thing.” He shrieked with laughter then, and yanked his bag wide open. He recalled feverishly how the lines of the road had stretched deep before him at one time, perfect in parallel and long as they cut through mountains. He knew it was time to be scratched with purpose. He knew the dead were mistaken.

His knees ached dully while his calves burn warmly while his lungs gasped sharply, rotating around and around a gaping pit. He pushed himself up one step by one step by one step, routinely slicing his hand while flinging pieces from his bag behind him. There was a gurgle echoing down below. He would have flung himself over the rail if not for the fact it might catch him as he fell. That, and he always preferred a view. He bared his teeth as he sucked in air, having long ago forgotten how to mimic a smile.

His mind shaken up like a soda can. He had lurched along over the edge and it was not as quick as he had imagined. The last glimmer of his higher faculties wondered if this was the experience of being inside a mind going insane. To be completely and utterly cut off from the rest of humanity. The glass pane between him and everyone else had calcified into concrete. You can’t connect to anyone when you’re nuts. He had damned himself by needing it, by needing people so badly he had lost control and wound up going on and on and alone now.

Homunculi, placid calm and numb happy, compressed the space that they were in beyond measure. They were walking in their courses and chittering as was their wont, and he had to mimic their language as he staggered around and between them, in one door and careening through stacks of dead tree, trying desperately to be out the other. Some homunculi were crude and some were so lovely he could not help but wonder how he had ever thought of them this way. But there was the creature, pitching forward between them all. The poet inside him had a fitting thought. The poet inside him wanted out. He rasped out what might have been a cackle, and found a piece of glass. Glass is not sturdy, but it is sharp. When he got the haypound of flesh out, it was dripping a brilliant blue. The heart looked exactly like turquoise.

The creature again. The creature always. His hands were so shaky, now. He knew he would be cut by what was in the bag and the fear of it was in him. He felt the mad hope that he could outrun it, but he was slower than ever. He was squelching with every step, legs rising from ground that was like the sucking mud which snares the riptide’s prey. He felt nothing in one way and everything in another. And he knew it would get worse, as he decided to atomize himself and anything around him. Yes, much worse.

Not thirty, but he was thirty million million things anyway. Just the borders of a loose confederation. The end of him was not the end. Everything would simply… dissipate. Spread a bit. Go your own way, boys. Godspeed, good luck. We were always better apart. He felt it in every step he stole, every corner he turned. Who chose this? How could he?

“You got no basis, is the trick of you,” said the thing he had made in the mirror. He had made the thing in the mirror to better see himself, because the mirror showed him perfectly and completely. But that just meant he saw himself kneeling there, a man who had no idea who he was. So he had to change some things, feed a little less into the glass, and that gave him some perspective. A cocked-head tilt view of the world.

“No basis whatsoever. So you drift! Of course you drift. A fish with no fins isn’t going wherever it wants, is it? So there. It goes with the currents. Until a fish with fins comes along, anyway! So there. No basis.” The thing he had made in the mirror paused, and in its eye was a gleam like a scalpel’s edge. “You have to get on something. Because if you have no basis, you need something to go on. Granted, granted,” the thing waved an arm, staving off an objection he had not made. “You won’t be going where you want to go. Where you choose to go! But that wasn’t ever going to be an option, you see, with no basis. At least this way you’ll be going somewhere.” The thing cackled, a short wave against his impassive gaze, and opened its gaping maw in a jagged grin.

The mind, like a broken radio attempting to send a signal, told his feet to move. Told his arms to rise. Told him to release himself, one last time.

No choices, in the end. He had waited too long. He made small inches away as the thing consumed him, the rubber squeaking of his sole mercifully taken by the enveloping dark.