It won't make sense, it all was just pouring out of my brain. Sit back and enjoy the ride. I've had a few non-Gatewayers read it, and they likened the experience to watching a Miyazaki film.
Comments are welcomed, but remember that this was done en media res, without my fingers once being picked up from the keys.
More to come as inspiration hits.
It'll take you maybe five minutes to read.
FRANKENSTEIN CHILD
"Torn apart by doubt, stitched again by an unseen salve."
“Do you trust me?” you asked, holding out your hand.
I guessed you were smiling. I couldn’t see you too well. The light behind you was too bright, and I can never make out what silhouettes are telling me. But for some reason my hand wormed its way from my pocket and found yours, and then you were pulling me closer and across the threshold, and I felt a rushing somewhere in my stomach.
My feet left the ground, but before I could gasp we were back down, tumbling into sweet grass and warm sunlight. The light here was softer, kinder, and when I got my bearings I could see your face, rather than just assuming it was there.
“Welcome!” you said, spreading your arms to the side.
I didn’t ask where we were, because I already knew. I was breathless yet, but my grasp on who I was would come back in time. Slowly, ever-so-slowly I managed to get myself to my feet. You snaked an arm around my waist, and pulled me into your side. We stood together there on the edge of Everything, and looked down into Nothing.
“All of this is ours.”
There were deep reds and cool blues and rich, rich greens all swimming together in an odd mural of colors, sounds, feelings, emotions. There was pain there, but it was the sort of knowing pain that brings you somewhere else. I licked my lips. I stared even harder.
“May I touch it?” I asked, but you smiled, and placed a finger over my lips.
“Shh. You’ll scare them.”
I didn’t ask who, because I already knew. I saw them crouched by the surface of Everything. They were naked, yet not in the proud, boastful way. In the sort of innocent, childlike way. There were four of them, and they were all the same.
They knelt as one, together. I felt like I was watching fawns prancing, dancing, although they did nothing but bow their heads. I couldn’t tell what they were doing. I looked at you with a question already in mind, but you quietly shook your head no, minutely to the left, and then to the right.
“Just watch.”
And so I watched.
They were pale, spindly, and had long spider-like fingers. In any other place, they would have been ugly and I would have withdrawn at once in horror. But here in this place, with this fresh newness they were young and beautiful, and I wanted nothing more than to clasp them to my chest. I watched as they wound their fingers through that of the one next to the other, then pulled, and pulled, and pulled.
An exquisite cry of pain emitted from the one in the middle. He was being stretched to the fullest extent. That pale, delicate skin grew, elongated until I could hear a horrible rendering. I saw the expressions of the others change from glib to glee. They pulled him to pieces. I saw red.
“Stop them!” was my cry, and I started off — where, I don’t know; we were still on the edge of Everything. But you stopped me before I could launch myself into Nothing, and no longer was your touch so kind.
“Do you see what they have been brought to do?” I struggled, but you were too strong. I suddenly felt very alone. “Do you see what you could become?”
“I am nothing like them!” I sobbed. “I have paid my dues. I have avoided this place as long as I could.”
“Yet here you are. And here I am.”
The sun was getting warmed on my face. Uncomfortably so.
“You are nothing better than me.”
My tears burned. They were hotter than they ought to have been. I wrestled an arm free to wipe them away. They were red. They were blood. And that was when you pushed me.
I knew a sudden, brilliant moment of terror — that knife of adrenaline severed through me and I was falling backwards, arms windmilling in panic. I couldn’t even scream your name. I knew you wouldn’t have saved me. I should have known. Why had I trusted you?
I am no better than they.
I think I fell into Darkness.
And it was then, I think, that the Knowing came even as they fell upon me with tiny cold pale hands and a sinful chattering I had not heard from on high ..
__________________________________________
“What can I say?” Later, I shrugged one shoulder glumly, speaking to the scattered pieces of my body. “I should have seen it coming.”
But my eyes were cast far away from my liver. My lungs were tangled perhaps around the splintered bits of bone that were once both legs. They had fallen on me, those little doubts, those little fears — and they had torn me to pieces.
And yet, there was no pain. I felt more stretched-out and like an odd Picasso than anything. Something in my brain (which was tucked neatly around my split thigh) was trying to tell me how this wasn’t right, how a body isn’t meant to be like this, but in all honesty, I couldn’t complain.
Seeing myself dissected, in parts, all mush and scattered scraps helped me understand more about myself. Why I did what I did, why I do the things I do — why I say the things I say.
“You’re a fool!” said my heart, scowling as only a heart can.
I lay there helplessly for quite some time, near Everything, but far from Nothing. I existed with the Knowing at this point, so there was nothing more for me to do. Even if anyone had passed, I don’t know what they could have done for me. I was wretched and wrecked, like a woeful shipwreck.
“This simply won’t do!” After a while, the moping could not help. “We must do something to fix this!”
I was torn asunder, but not eaten. I could pull myself together on my own merit, without you, without your words. It hurt. There was pain, the sort of pain that is dark and bleak and unknowing (as I did not have my eyes!) but it was good. At least I was feeling something again.
I thought, perhaps, I could hear footsteps — maybe you had returned? But my ears were too far from the rest of me, and I could not afford the effort of trying to strain anymore for your sake. All my energy was on this task. On fixing myself. On being no longer broken.
But you cannot take back ripples, and soon I was complete, but not whole. I sat up and looked at the self-made stitches.
“This will do,” such a freak, a Frankenstein of a child! I dragged myself to my feet. “I am a mural, a conversation piece of what is broken.”
They had left me, the doubts, no doubt taken their fill on what had once been my complete spirit. I tilted my head back (not too far; my neck was not quite patched) and realized how far I had fallen.
“Then we shall soldier on!” said one leg to another.
“But we have fallen so far!” said my foot, giving a woeful sigh.
Such a curious thing, to have to speak to the many parts of your body like this. They had worked together in such harmony before! But now, here I was, coaxing my feet to stroll in the direction I wanted them to.
“Let us go, lads and lasses!” I said as cheerfully as possible. “We have time to make, and things to do. And should the sun set and we are not in a safe place, then the Doubt will come back once more. And who knows what will happen?”
This caused a great deal of dissent. I could find no pockets for my hands to rest in; I was as naked as the day I was born. And yet this did not deter me. I began to walk. I began to walk through Everything, on the barest and finest edge of it All.
___________________________________________
I saw highs and lows there in the valley. I knew more than I had known when I was past the Veil, and I never again wanted to return. There was an odd sort of disassociation that I achieved, then in that period of time. With my legs, knees, calves, feet, and toes all chatting with each other amiably, I was free to dwell on other things besides that tiresome task of walking.
Yes. I will admit, I thought of you and the great Betrayal. I thought of the Fall, and yet, I did not resent you for it. How could I? I had pushed and pushed and pushed you before; had tugged on your sleeve and begged and pleaded for something more than what was offered. There in that moment when it was all balanced on a doubt, I could not have picked a worse bet.
“Where to, chief?” my chest barked, no doubt considering itself in some sort of managerial position, as my body lurched to a stop.
I blinked a few times, and my eyes squeaked in protest as I glanced around me, ahead of me, above and down — but not behind, never behind.
“I guess we had best continue on.”
The soft, sweet grass was turning into harsher scrub, and I knew soon my feet would be complaining about the roughness of the earth. My toes curled into what little grass there was to feel, as though savoring the sensation.
“We’ll be alright!” said one toe to the other. “We always are!”
“Easy for you to say,” muttered my heel.
“You’ve spent enough time in my mouth lately,” I commented with a wry sort of smile, “that this ought to be a piece of cake.”
Frankenstein Child. Ripped apart by doubt, patched by some unseen salve. All I saw was emptiness before me, and haze. I was leaving the lushness behind, heading off into the unknown. And yet, I knew it was right. It was just. There was nothing else for me to do. Nowhere else for me to run.
“We are losing sunlight,” said my chest again, in that officious tone. “We ought to carry on.”
“Sound advice,” I said, and we plodded on.
_______________________________________________
I lost myself for a while, in time. The grassland turned to scrub, as I had thought, and the ground became more cracked and parched. Great crags split the earths and I took care not to become tangled in briars.
The sky was no longer its pure blue. It grew a pale, hazy white as the sharp outlines of clouds became only part of everything else. I was sad to lose the blue, but perhaps there was a whole new palate of colors waiting for me on the other side of this wasteland?
My body and I did not speak. It knew its current task, and it knew not to complain. I felt weariness after a spell, and even as my feet could not lift themselves far enough to not be torn by thorns, I did not cry out. I knew pain. I knew what it was to have my skin ripped from my bone. These pricks, this stinging; it was nothing.
But I tripped, and fell, and crashed into the earth, which seemed glad to have finally claimed me. You will not have me yet! I wanted to cry, but I could not ball a fist to strike at the starved, hardened soil. You cannot claim me!
“We’re sorry, chief,” my chest was heaving, and its tiny, authoritative voice cracked and gave way to pure despair. “Can’t go no further.”
My legs drew themselves closer to my chest, to comfort it. My hands locked around the front of my shins. Fetal position. Like a babe.
“Get up!” I wept. My eyes squeezed themselves shut — the best attempt at a hug they could muster. “Get up, get up, get up! We cannot be finished. We cannot be done!”
Yet my body would not obey me. I was curled, corrupted, desponded, sobbing in a growing desert just starting to throb with merciless heat.
“Get up, you must. You must get up!” but there I stayed.
Here we were far from Everything, heading towards what we Did Not Know. My body and I had been torn apart, thrust back together. It always sold me short. Where were those thorns? I would scratch at my eyes until they bled. I would split myself from the rest, again, and this time we would not return.
I tried feebly to move, but my body would not listen yet again. It wrapped itself tighter and tighter, crying out from every pore in its body.
I hated my body. I wanted it to lift me up, to send me prancing down runways and onto magazine covers, but instead, it was too thick in places. It was always making me say the wrong thing. making me do the wrong thing. Making me feel the wrong things.
“You hate all of us, your body, so!” said my heart, gently, “but have we ever said a bad word about you?”
The answer was, of course, no. I wept. My body wept harder.
“How far we have fallen!” we cried. “Oh, how far!”
And there I was. After all of that. Was I collapsed onto cracked earth, or bathroom tile?
I couldn’t know.
