Guilt

Big idea. Very little hope.

He turned around, and there, hovering in midair, was a gigantic grinning set of razor-sharp teeth. Pointy rows of pearly whites stuck together perfectly in a Glasgow smile that sent a chill through ___'s spine just looking at it.

It just floated there! And the individual teeth were so large and...shiny, and...the grin, it was...so...beautiful...

Before he knew it, ___'s hand had approached the teeth ever closer, his fingers twitching uncontrollably but pressing on, wanting to touch the delightful set of teeth.

And when it barely touched the tip of one of the sharp fangs, the mouth opened up with a large sigh, like a gaping black hole. There was no tongue inside it of which to speak of, nor a throat, for where would it have led, if not for some invisible body lurking in the air. And then the mouth clamped shut, the sound of metal clamps resounding throughout the area.

They all fell back, their eyes still fixed on the stunningly large teeth...!

But the mouth was gone! Just as it had appeared in a gust of smoke, so had it left, in the same manner as that of an extinguished candle.

What was the mouth, they wondered? So beautiful and intriguing, yet ravenous, vicious...animal-like and yet friendly in its gaze?

Could a mouth see, thought ___? Maybe. He didn't know...

© 2014 Mr. Misanthrope

Author's Note

Another random part from something I had been planning for a very long time. The main character's name was undecided. At this point I'm just really enjoying the feeling of uploading stuff after such a long time away from the site, so after the first few, I've now been ripping through everything trying to find stuff.

The lack of context might make things a little bit more difficult to appreciate, but I can't really go into explaining what my ideas were for this without taking a lot of space and 'time' up. However, there are a few things I can talk about. Firstly, I couldn't help but get a little bit nostalgic after finding and reading this, in that the idea of a floating disembodied mouth together with a pair of gloved hands (I'm guessing the hands were meant to appear later) was so clearly influenced by the video games I was into at the time. Secondly, I kept digging through my notes and found what this figment of the character's imagination (yes, that's what it's meant to be) was: "GUILT - A large disembodied mouth with sharp teeth and always wearing a smile. Occasionally lashes out with fierce mood swings and two clawed hands in gloves that appear during one of these swings".

I'm fairly confident I had written at least another little snippet like this about another one of these figments. I'll be sure to post it should I find it.

Written 18 May 2010.