i try and feel the sunshine. but you bring the rain. you try and hold me down. with your complaints. you cry and moan and complain. you whine and tear. up to my neck and sorrow. the touch you rain. you just don't step inside to, to fourteen years. so hard to keep my own head. that's what i said, and you know. i've been the beggar. i've played the thief. i was the dog. they all tried to beat. but it's been fourteen years of silence. it's been fourteen years of pain. it's been fourteen years that're gone forever and i'll, never have again. your stupid girlfriends tell you. that i'm to blame. yeah, they're all used up has-beens. out of the game. this time i'll have the last word. you hear what i say. i try to see it your way. won't work today. you don't just step inside to, to fourteen years. it's so hard to keep my own, that's what i said, and you know. i've been the dealer. hanging on your street. i was the dog, they all tried to beat. but it's been fourteen years of silence. it's been, fourteen years of pain. it's been fourteen years that're gone forever. and i'll never have again. bullshit and contemplation, gossip's their trade. if they knew half the real truth, what would they say? but i'm past the point of concern, it's time to play. these last four years of madness. sure put me straight. don't get back fourteen years, in just one day. so hard to keep my head, just go away, you know. just like the hooker, she said. nothing for free. oh, i tried to see it your way. i tried to see it your way...
yeah, that song is appropriate. why? because i've been screwing around in this game for fourteen years... been screwing around for fourteen years. where does it all go? where did it all slip away? truthfully, i don't know. i look back, and it all feels so long ago, i wonder where it all went wrong. well, that's not a hard question to answer, i suppose... birth. but no, i don't get it. why didn't i realise earlier that all the tarts i've dated were worthless representations of the only woman i despise? my mother. really, they've all either been carbon photostatic copies or have possessed her more annoying traits. it's funny, in a perverse kind of way. Oedipus was a motherfucker. no pun intended.
no, really, i don't understand it... i'm really not that thick headed... then again, i've been where i'm heading. to the cold place. the distant place. the unfeeling place. i've been there before, for about five, six years. then... then... well, she came in and fucked it all up. and yeah. a lot of this has to do with that. not her, not even really what she managed... but, just, in general. the constant bullshit and substandard humans in my life. and yeah, for clarification, i'm generalising. i'm always generalising, and it fucking annoys me when people don't realise that and take shit i say personally. -shrugs-
i don't know. i'm tired and scattered... i wrote last night. started and finished 21. it made me happy. i felt accomplished. it's beautiful, it really is. it made me cum a little. literally. matter of fact, as it is technically far removed from the continuity of the story [up to this point], and it's completely anonymous, i'll post it. fuck it, i don't have anything else to say at the moment. not really. so, here it is... 21 GHOSTS III...
21 GHOSTS III
A
n explosion rocked the sky from the distance, a bright orange glow emanating from the horizon line. Heads turned and stared, some thought it was the sun for a brief second, an early dawn, far too early, or a late sunset. Until they felt the percussion vibrate their internal organs. Screams of terror filled the night from every pedestrian and open window. Grass cracked on the ground level a mile around, and the windows within a hundred yards shattered. Car alarms sounded and mixed with the shrieks, creating a toxic cocktail of dissonance.
Faces turned and were lost in the blast, and a moment later, televisions across the city were blanketed with an instant of static before cutting from the inane sitcoms to a panic stricken blonde behind a news desk. Her eyes were red with tears and her lip quivered; she sat behind the desk, in front of the camera, her eyes wide and twitching with fear. It could be seen behind those eyes that she did not know what to say, and while the teleprompter scrolled it was not being processed by her brain. The low, hoarse whispers of the crew could be heard over the deafening silence.
The apartment building was left in shambles, and screams still echoed throughout the city, along the alleyways and coursing through the veins leading to and through the city. Panic clung to every voice, every throat, every set of lungs, and spilled forth from every set of lips. The city was under siege, and no one had a clue as to why, or by whom. A large man with close set eyes and an open can of Pabst Blue Ribbon screamed out his window about Arabs, Jesus and Armageddon, and those shrieks were greeted with ascent from the few who could hear him.
Others, closer to the scene, knew a little more of the truth, but still not enough to make an informed guess. They simply stood and stared at the wreckage that surrounded them, nursing wounds caused by flying glass and shrapnel, watching the burning corpses lay in the street at night. A young girl with dark hair and darker eyes stood on a street corner in a gymnastics leotard and watched half a man crawl from the blaze, screaming for someone to help his wife and unborn child.
Offices and apartments near the blast had been gutted by the explosion, sending a shower of glass in all directions comparable to the storm the city had just experienced. The people on the streets below were torn to shreds, even those in cars who thought they would be safe, the glass and debris was too much for the windshields of any car. One man watched as a plush manager’s chair splintered the windscreen, the glass and splinters of wood left him blind and breathing his own blood.
The young girl approached the man screaming for his wife and knelt before him, her head cocked and a terrible sadness seeping down her face. In her hand was a ragged teddy bear. Her body was covered in the blood of her father who had managed to push her to safety, but not able to save himself. He had been reduced to a pulp of viscera and vitae before her very eyes, and as she plopped down on the street with the man, her leotard torn by glass and smouldering debris, she reached out and touched the man. His legs had been reduced to a smear, how he’d managed to crawl this far would never be known, maybe it was sheer will alone, and the need to find someone who could possibly save his wife. All he found was the child sitting before him now.
She reached out and touched his face, wiping the ash and blood from around his eyes. A sniffle wrinkled her nose as she slipped the bear from under her arm and pressed it toward the man. He clung to it and sobbed, and the girl watched as he died, clutching her childhood trinket.
It was then that a sea of red lights flooded the burning cityscape, a flood of fire trucks and ambulances descending upon the epicentre of the blast. An officer climbed out of his cruiser, a cigarette burning down between his lips. He approached the small girl on the street, with the wrecked shards of a man, still screaming for his wife as he ascended to St Peter. The officer was unable to speak; all he could manage was to pull the child from the ruins and set her in the backseat of his cruiser.
Further out, a faithless priest stood before the pulpit, looking to God for forgiveness for losing his faith, when a distant aftershock shattered a pain of stained glass. Gabriel’s face fell in gaping shards and sliced the priests face open. He rose in that instant, his lip hanging loose from his visage, and he thanked God for his divine penance. The priest danced up and down the aisle between the pews, singing the praises of the Almighty. He shrieked loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of voices ringing out all around the church, the city – he cried loud enough for even God to hear him.
Torrents flooded from the hoses to the fiery rubble of the apartment building and the buildings surrounding. One fireman said something to another about not seeing the point, as there was no way in hell anyone could have survived the blast. His fellow agreed, but continued to aim the nozzle of the hose to the base of the bonfire, steel girders exposed, piercing the heavy smoke and dust. They were burning orange in the darkness of night from the heat of the explosion and wilting like dead flowers toward the street. The firemen all shook their heads as they continued to blast it all with water and foam, they all knew it was a total lost, and as they looked back at the Chief, he shook his head with them and turned away from the embers.
The hoses sputtered to a halt, and an echo of gunfire rang through the city.
A man stood just outside the revolving door of an apartment building, eyes focused on the razorblade skyline, silhouetted against the burning heavens. The bonfire of concrete and glass rose to the sky and lit the heavens on fire, the flames licking the feet of the Almighty. He cursed and looked down at his clothes, collecting the falling ash.
Brakes squealed like a daemon’s song in the heart of the city, penetrating it like a hypodermic, a blast of adrenaline and gunfire. The chalk white stone of the courthouse exploded in the darkness, adding a white dust to the sea of black ash and swirled with it to the ground. The pair of men in the stolen Mercedes laughed and fired more rounds into the building. In the rear view, the driver saw a young woman scurrying through the debris that the city was becoming. She held her coat close to her body, heavy and black – it had once been pink wool – her arms wrapped around her body, she ran with her eyes focused on the ground to sidestep the debris that the city was becoming.
The car was thrown into reverse and the small woman was forced into the backseat by a third man, emerging from the shadows.
From the courthouse an explosion ripped through the night and it began to rain inside the car. The driver’s head was reduced to a stub and the gash against his Adam’s apple was obliterated. The crack of a pump shotgun followed, and the passenger was reduced to a pulp. The third man pushed the rear door open into the street, away from the courthouse and sprinted into the night, and the girl was left in the back, screaming, clothes already half torn off. A hand opened the door and reached through – it was rough, but she reached out and took it, her body being removed from the vehicle, face splattered with blood.
With all the police either at the sight of the explosion or taking care of the own, the criminals that called the city home were like children in a candy store, and the wizened old man helped the woman inside the courthouse with a word of comfort. They would be safe inside, at least, he hoped. He stood and leaned against the heavy double doors rising high into the architecture of the old building, reloading the shotgun. He handed her a towel and pointed her toward the restroom to clean the blood from her face – the clothes were too stained. The blood was so thick it was black.
On a street corner near a coffeehouse, a brittle old man was being thrashed into the sidewalk; teeth skittered like candy and the deep arterial red of blood sprayed from his lips, coating his chin and old polyester shirt with gore. The attacker could be no older than twelve, but with an aluminium ball bat, size and strength were inconsequential.
Standing on a rooftop, a man stood with a bible and a rosary, surveying the decadence. He crossed himself and looked to the heavens for forgiveness. The man took a deep breath and hugged the soft leather bible to his chest, taking a step into space. He knew it was not the end-times, but he knew that in this city, the people were one step away from the edge, that it would take but one thing to bring out the worst in all. One thing to turn them to vicious animals, and whatever the explosion was, it was the trigger that stripped the populace of any order. By dawn, by the end of this – there would be many victims, and he would not allow himself to be one. His skull shattered like a vase as it collided with the concrete.
In the remnants of a boarded up apartment, a small boy no older than eleven cowered in the corner of the kitchen in the small space between the stove and the wall. He pushed against the corner, trying to crawl inside the shadows, crawl into the wall itself and become invisible. He curled in on himself and whimpered silently, eyes wide with terror. In the flickering light of the kitchen, he watched the bulk of his father near his mother, the spark of a blade wrapped inside his hand. It rose and fell, many times, decimating the beautiful features of his mother. She used to tell him that she’d been a model, and that his father had once been a star basketball player in high school. The child knew the story well; she’d tell him every time he found her with a bottle in her hand – it was the final game of the season, the championship game in their senior year and he went down. His father had never gotten back up, and the boy was born a few months later – his mother was bound by some womanly duty to stand by the boy’s father.
The boy whimpered – it barely escaped his lips, but it was audible, and the behemoth of his father pushed the stove aside to expose the child. He raved about the child ruining his life; he leaned down and stared into the boy’s eyes with the fires of hell burning. The boy tried to wipe the spittle from his face, but his father’s hand reached out and clutched his arm, it broke in several places, but the pain was only temporary. His father saw to that.
Church doors are left unlocked when someone is present. The priest lay crucified to the floor; his blind eyes dripped tears of blood as he gurgled his last breaths. Candles were knocked from the plinths, and as his world faded to black, he felt the flames licking at his hands and feet.
An officer stood in the middle of the street, his shield discarded at his feet. His shining black shoes were dull and dead; and his uniform hung in tatters. In his hands was held his service pistol, exploding in random directions at random angles. One after another after another until the magazine was empty, and another fed into the gaping mouth. The trigger was pulled continuously, he never stopped firing, and all around him bodies fell. Devils and innocents alike, pierced by stray bullets – the sting as they entered the flesh was nothing to the explosion against the bone as the soft core fragmented and travelled along, wrecking the viscera and entrails. The officer sobbed for his mother, to take it all away, to make it all better.
High in one of the office buildings, the glass blown out, a man sat with his back to his desk and watched as the city devoured itself, a young girl frail and broken in his lap, doing his bidding. His hands were wrapped in her hair and his face held a scarred smirk as he watched from on high the debris that the city was becoming. There were no consequences, anymore, and he lifted the girl from his lap, dripping his seed, and flung her out the window.
The small body landed at the feet of the officer and staring with horror at the debased child, and all the bodies surrounding him in a circle, he found that he had but one bullet left. He closed his eyes and collapsed, reaching blindly for the girls hand as he wrapped his lips around the burning barrel. The smell of roasting flesh was gnarled in his nostrils as he cursed God and the Devil and the debris that the city had become.
This is the way the world ends…
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
later, fuckers.
this is the way the world ends.
