An Act of Imagination
Fiction
What’s the difference between fiction and story? A story, true or not, is meant to be told. Fiction, though it might have originated from stories, might not be said. Such is a piece like this. Such is a notebook like this where I’ve written FICTION in large capitals on the front page.
But does it truly lack an audience? Such that the bleakness of human beauty won’t alter it. With no greater purpose, it shall be beautiful. It’d have objective oneness and a strange pureness. But no. It’s meant for the man’s monstrous silhouette that has big hands and grey caustics for eyes. His eyes are mine and his brain’s a segment of my own. And his stare—so close that the two pairs of eyes become one—wilts me. When I close my eyelids, my eyes are all his. Then he looks at me—a man with empty eye sockets and a deformed head—sitting with folded arms and legs through a cherry-red tinted mist that unfurled as far as he could see. There was no sun, but the mist—more like fog—had its own light. Uh, I recall the cherry-red glow that made my sweat look like burgundy blood. I was scared, like a stray cat really. So well, he is the audience I’m writing for. He is the one who destroys this obscure beauty. I write for him as I lay down the words.
Reader, you don’t have to guess, I’m lonely. Between walls and windows, I’m trapped in my room that’s squeezed between a hallway and my parent’s bedroom. I keep the doors closed—though they can’t be locked as my room doubles as a passage—but I’ve pulled the curtains before my desk. I look at the cypress’ branches, barely visible through my room light, when I get enough privacy to grind morphine tablets. (You thought I was writing this in daylight, didn’t you?) The dust on my table is morphine. I even tried opium and alcohol, but opium’s too costly and alcohol is hard to hide. Nevertheless, you, reader, love morphine and I love how you give my eyes back. I could, if only for an hour, see dreams. Dreams don’t come during sleep—matter of fact, I don’t recall ever seeing one but have read about them—but more like pictures in active imagination. No, not active imagination either, I don’t choose them, hence I call them dreams. The images, except once which I shall come back to, are of creatures who were once humans. Withered women. And their cries, gosh-awful their cries, that are agonising even to a war-field dog. A mother and a daughter crying at each other’s faces for so long that the black of their iris was corroded by the salt in their tears and were flowing down their cheeks. The black liquid was acidic to mangle their skin and melt their pink lips. The drops fall on their white shirts. They made glass paintings of a cathedral without the faces.
The one instance I promised to come back was fairly recent. One month, seven days ago. Late September when the creatures weren’t descended humans, but a man so obscure that even the most omnipresent voices of my conscience had not seen him. I do not know why he looked to be holding a secret—a secret of a future—underneath his skin and veins. I owned his obscurity and he owned my hope. He wore loose formals—the looseness of which was hiding his starvation. His face was of a skeleton blessed with skin, that made his eyes appear bludged. He had no teeth. And he had no voice. Like a snake on slippery ice, he tried running towards me. His run, or rather walk, was of purpose. He wasn’t lost crystallising hopeless romantics and hoping to lose his faith fast, so the idealised beings turn into demons, make the shadowy inner creatures larger, and give death a purpose to accept a being it had rejected prior. Being lonely to be dismissed by death, that’s what I am, reader. I stood there and slowly a cherry-red tinted mist unfurled and made his picture fainter until the mist was white and I was looking through the window at fog-hidden cypress branches. The earliest morning fog had somehow left a burgundy impression on my eyes.
One month and seven days as I said, and I have increased my morphine dose in hopes of seeing him again. How can I forget him? How could I forget him? A person lost of a future is deemed to chase the faintest light. Even the light of starvation is better than no change. Better than not writing a word for a month. Holding my eyes off my parents who keep moving to shout at the water supplier and then going back to searching analogue cable TV signals. I don’t utter a word, I used to be sober during the day, but on the thirteenth day of his disappearance, my night high was dragged till the burgundy fog. The light entered my room as a pinpoint ray in a smoky oven. I wasn’t there: not on my bed or the floor. But a distant observer looking at a man’s outline in smoke. Its movements were deliberate and controlled. It was gesturing to my room’s dust-laden air in a choir harmony. No particle had a choice but to follow commands. I don’t know how long it went—an hour or a few days—but I was at the end of it on my chair. The fog outside was white as it should be. Even a few of the cypress branches were rattling. But my table was covered in what seemed like morphine dust. And I heard rustles in the other room. They were up… I licked it, I sniffed it. I cleaned it with my lips and lungs. The table shone as if a fresh coat of varnish was applied. It looked like coffee candy. I swear, I smelled caramel. I wanted to bite it, or if not that, at least lick it. So, I got closer. And kept getting closer. The air was again viscous and the Pacific between Russia and Alaska was tormented between us—me and the sugar top. I felt reaching it, then it was the darkest, voidest dream I had.
Days must have passed as strong green leaves had started yellowing. My head on the table—felt itchy and a strange smell tickled my nose, one you could find in a slaughterhouse. I could only open one eye, the other eyelid was shut to my cheeks and pulling it hurt. Faced sideways I could see the foot marks on the white wall up my bed. I observed—researched—the smell. It all had the burgundy film up top. Was that an imaginary artefact?
Sometime later, mother was holding my shoulders shaking them gently and calling my name. I lifted my body with great force that had the momentum of an easygoing lever. The right of my face was sizzling. The table was covered in a shiny, candy-like, coat of blood. My right eye was forced open when I realized I must be blind on the eye as there wasn’t any light but a sensation of liquid in it. I touched my face. It was like touching foot marks on dry concrete. My gaze at the table was the refraction of my mother’s who looked through me. Then that woman cried on the floor. The table shone perfect.
I failed at everything she, and he, and they had deemed me to be, reader. Or deem ‘it’ to be—that’s how I should be called from now on. I long for humans. And they know, and you know, they never come. You know so well. Now, with my face, everyone remaining would know too. Except for the man whose starvation materialised mother’s only child’s failure. And for a fact, today after writing this I’ll go for a stroll uninfluenced to finally meet him below yellow stars to chatter about something—something losing which makes one—no, me—my self no one, or reader, selfless.
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