Echo

Sick unto death with long agony my senses left me. The last of distinct accentuation reached my ears, the inquisitorial voices merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of terrible exaggeration! Lips of black-robed judges traced grotesqueness.  They fashioned syllables of delirious horror.   Night was the universe.

Some time ago she was established as a distinguished essence with unrestricted supremacy.  This much she embraced.  It was murky reflections she abandoned.  Though she could experience the wrench of her lineage she renounced it.  Her rightful title was concealed beneath a multi-layered exterior.  And these feminine characteristics she selected to decorate herself in were anything but her authentic form.  For now she called herself Echo.

 Obscurity overflowed the remote body whose head hung low.  Her uncovered feet stepped over charred torsos and severed heads.  Sticky burgundy ribbons weaved across diminutive blades of grass.  Not an inch had been spared she noted as she pressed on.  Slanting her analysis, she tried to advise herself the consequence vindicated the means, but that now seemed to be a superficial justification.

 Amber kissed the skies.  There was no telling how elongated the love affair would last between melancholy and providence, but as she tilted her head back she questioned whether it genuinely mattered.  There had been another time where such contemplations gyrated merely in reveries.  It seemed so long ago and yet as she continued to make her way through the pasture of scattered and destroyed bodies it came rushing back to her like a ghastly dream.

Slumped in a chair, she regarded the keys under her fingers with contempt.  As she slapped each one with a quick stroke she imagined it as a face.  Before her was a resolution contrasting generally others she faced in the past.  Now staring into gloom as it wrapped around her, she sighed.  Perhaps it was better to reside in the pits of hell, she thought.  The price for happiness was always out of her budget.

She turned.  Her neck popped and her back stiffened.  The man who hobbled around the corner was a stocky fellow with scruffy brown hair and bleak blue eyes.  Her view narrowed.  For a man not quite thirty-five he moved as though he were eighty.  She considered the possibility his prodigious girth had something to do with it although the Osteoarthritis in his ankle and foot might be more likely contributing factors. 

The memory evaporated.  That was the former world.  She cared never to restructure it.  After all it was a world besmirched by voracity and those within it threatened to subtract her most darling fortune.  Now they could never again attempt that despicable exploit. 

Of course this unraveled in threadlike strips.  Philosophy revolved around a contemporary prospect encased in white padded walls.  Their blinding white purity mocked her.  She had yet to determine which reality was true and not some forsaken breed of madness. 

Waves rippled, changing truth before her eyes.  As she closed them she found her arms free and silence was broken by the sound of pained moans.  As she sat in the creaking wooden chair she bent forward.  Her belly was swollen, aching from the pill she took hours ago, as she read the small type on the screen.  Chewing her cheek she wondered how it all came to this.  People aired others dirty laundry while hiding their own in a deep dark closet.  Was it all a game?  Hanging her head she decided it didn't matter anymore.  People were going to continue walking in between lines normally never crossed just to paint themselves in a favorable light.

 Her eyes briefly fluttered shut.  A wave of nausea rolled in and out.  Twisting her hair between her fingers she took a deep breath.  Time would make it all go away; she thought and looked over at the bed.  It looked inviting but any sleep would be interrupted by the frequent need to urinate and vomit.

Shadows decayed to her right.  Light passed between the blinds, shifted and then died.  As darkness rushed in to take its place she paused, a hand clutching her belly.  There had to be end to it all.  There had to be something in her might to cease the agony of mortal suffering.

Throbbing in her temples was the memory of sorrow.  It only provoked the torment marching on her insides.  Lifting herself up she staggered toward the bed where she collapsed and stared skyward, eyes clamped shut.  There had to be relief somewhere.  And if not it failed to result in dreams, then where?

When her eyes opened the padded room greeted her with deafening silence.  Soon the devil would slither in the bounds of this cushioned cell to beleaguer her with monstrous conspiracies currently set in pause mode.  They were to be summoned into the world by a solitary utterance and she knew it was only an issue of when and where.

From under the door a red carpet bled toward her feet.  Halfway in it divided and encircled her.  Within its churning rivulet, faces twisted in distress.  None of them were her own.  Meaty like threads spawned from their sleek borders.  They spread akin to withered hands and left in their wake skinless tissue.  It writhed like two lovers at the pinnacle of ecstasy.  Up the padded walls it proliferated.  Each inch was disguised.  Now the chamber she sat in, her arms restricted by a pristine jacket-shaped garment, disclosed to every one of her evolving senses something other than a protected room forged by man.

This was reality.  Although untrained mortal eyes could not see it, it existed without a shred of doubt. Twin incandescent gems scrutinized infinite space where they deposited genesis.  Darkness, formless and empty, bled from her womb, bubbled and brewed substance.  Substance, under her orchestration, sowed ether and earth.  Animation in water and in air generated from her respiration.  It was a gust of atmosphere that flushed pigmentation to every cosmos near and far. 

Shimmering ginger discharged from a descending sun.  Over prosperous white peak mountains it sank as sand beneath her feet reminded her of earth she stood on and the shadow loomed over her as her mind once again turned its channel.

 In a pathway of moonlight, her lean figure lurched forward. The soft orb in the sky was a sapphire fixed amongst flecks of twinkling golden gems.  Peace was a foreign substance that never ceased to exist.  She held her head and closed her eyes. Trying to remember was an infernal succession of torture.  She neared the busy black ribbon of road where she watched her silhouette emerge.  The maleness within yearned to release his insanity and with that femininity slipped away.  In an instant what distinguished her as female altered under planets of mist and an assortment of tinctures.

The stars were staring and whispering amongst themselves. His eyes rounded.  He covered his ears. He could not listen. It was all lies!  I will not say consciousness was lost. It was difficult to define. In the deepest slumber the grave was immortality for man. Arousing from the return to life from the shadows of the tomb, the perfume of some novel flower arrested his attention. These shadows of a hideous dizziness oppressed me. So far I had not opened my eyes. I lay on my back unbound, reached out my hand, and it dared to employ my vision.

Neither male nor female or human nor immortal, I obey no laws in regards to appearance, height, weight and sex. In truth I am nothing yet everything. I am physical if I chose to be, but usually I like being without shape as form tends to be unnaturally kind.

My siblings are not like an ordinary family. We have no mother or father. We just are. Some may argue we had to be born from something, but we have always been. It is difficult though to appease mortal logic.

I dreaded objects around me. I feared to look upon things horrible with a wild desperation at heart. Blackness of eternal night encompassed me. The intensity of darkness elapsed. Moreover my dungeon relapsed into insensibility. Impeded by walls, the most hideous of fates, I resolved to bathe in decayed fungus.

With its direst physical agonies, long suffering and burning thirst consumed terrible circumstances which environed confusion. The pendulum permitted business nearly annihilated by reflection of a damned spirit! Scarcely had I eluded their execution for many hours.