I am (Not) What I am Page #7

The Great Irritation

• Fiction
• Horror
• Short story
• Fantasy

								


Parts of him were sick of being picked apart by women. But ultimately he could not blame them. He felt repulsive: a shit stain smeared on the world— mange ridden, eyes implacable, head a muscular box, gnarled of tooth, scabrous, breath as foul as corpses— a noxious sight. He knew that, compared to other Men, he was a ghoulish thing: vampiric, some cadaverous abomination, spindle limbed and greasy— the enemy of God’s beauty. Carnivorous and crouching; his inner pupils glowed with an internal fire. He avoided mirrors, avoided sunlight— his two most intense allergens. When caught in their beams, it felt as if  everything burned an irradiated orange. So, he stuck to the shadows, moved, as best he could, only at night: a border stalker, an earth rim roamer, a living nocturne. But the young man was a tourist to the dark. More dangerous men lived there. The street corners he tried to sleep on were the homes of drug dealers and vagrants: and when he came near, or wanted to occupy a square of their walk, they shooed him away— puffing their chests, guns and knives at the ready.  He was stabbed twice: once in the arm and another time in the left side. The wounds now wept yellow pus; their edges gangrenous and bubbling with sores. It was a full time job to keep them clean: stealing alcohol, bandages and wipes from stores, frequenting public bathrooms. All the while, he grew filthier and filthier: covered in trash thrown at him by passersby, coated in the grime of the city’s muscular physique. In his sleep, insects and crows pecked at the open lesions. They followed him around like ravening shadows; sniffing at the blisters. He couldn’t stand how nauseating he was. Urine stained, sour. In his heart of hearts, he knew that no one would ever love him in this state;  knew no one would help, knew he would walk this earth alone for the rest of his days. The fear was an aphrodisiac, the main driver in his life; as powerful as it was in any other man— symmetrical though reflected in a one way mirror. 
Its influence on him spiraled out of control with a velocity unmatched; the light speed of dread traveling up his spine— branching through every node, every nerve. When the streets were empty, he hugged himself and cried. When populated again, he sat like a man who was dead already— vibrating with an intense inner turmoil.  Desperation clung to him like a ripe scent, blackening the air with its stench. His very soul was a landfill, polluted by passions most innumerable: building upon one another like concentric circles of Hell. Rapacious. Continual. Desires slipped between his fingers like sand in an hourglass: second by second— passing smiles, pretty faces, groomed edifices. The lives of people who did not know how good they had it. In the presence of their magnificence, nothing felt of value: not plague or war, or the worship of riches. The spinning of time and space. Nothing. Even his own body, his very life, was inconsequential. He did not want to die, but couldn’t stand another day living within the cage that kept him apart from the one— the many. He would have sold the world for a chance at love. Concupiscence mounting. Envy of Men grew intenser by the day, accentuating just how out of step he was with the world. The indignity of it all, the unfairness; never brave enough to embody his rage, never satisfied enough to quench his fever— the jittering growing plainer the more he denied it. God, it seemed, was an invisible ever-erring power: elevating favorites, striking down victims— regardless of merit or demerit. Agony, an abundant food for the Eagle of the Lord. Everything was wreckage, chaos— a weak and unstable system, buried in the mire of its own desolation. The world, the young man conceived, was abandoned, a cosmic orphan: a grand folly given up to the indulgences of the Evil One. It’s global apocalypse having begun before any Man was ever born— signaling the end of all permanence. Every night he closed his eyes, and the young man thought that the world would end at that instant: sky turning strawberry under vanishing light,  concealing the strike of a missile, men rushing to their homes for warmth as glaciation banished all heat below the rim of the world. Then upon opening his eyes, he saw it all continue another day— growing worse another day. It was an arduous thing. He felt regret that he couldn’t live a normal life. But in some way, he also felt invincible; immortal, an indestructible fiend— unable to be toppled by common lethalities. Disease, fatigue, hunger, thirst; they were only weights for him to bear like some beast of burden, trudging along the trek of his miserable pilgrimage. His woeful belt.  

He couldn’t stop now, he wasn’t allowed to: his task was already set— prepare the way for the Master, make His paths straight, become the high road leading to the Beast’s ultimate supremacy. But he did not know what to do. Red nights stretched into irradiated dawn, the young man pacing, pacing— thinking. How could he ever hope to appease the Horde: that congregation of lean and incessant wolves— forever yapping, starving, clawing in the most desolate banks of his mind? Invasive. Emboldened by the dark. How could he achieve the unattainable when the sight of him would be shunned by the whole human race? He did not know. It’s as if the Wille vied for his failure: the complications, part of a sadistic game to push him over the edge, make him crack for fun. Their torment had already turned him into an outcast; society’s waste. A most savage and deformed animal. And among the faithless and perverse of his generation, he did not know where he belonged. He did not know if he ever would. Religious? Secular? He walked a thin line between the two: its bridge hovering over a vast and never ending crevasse. No matter his position, theist, skeptic, he knew he’d always feel worthless for as long as he remained as he was. All validation gone, wiped clean, effaced from the young man’s cerebrum like colorful graffiti off a smooth brick wall. White knuckling some cruel eternity, Olympian endurance stretched beyond spans of stars, the young man knew the answer to man’s perennial question. “For whom does the bell toll?” His answer: ‘Everyone and anyone but him.’  He was spared forever by both God and Devil— particularly the latter. Thanatos, Angel of the Lord, avoided all temptation to snatch him— not for a million years— out of fear of getting his hands dirty. Sooted from contact with his filthy flesh. 

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