1
Time: Sometime
Place: Nowhere
A relic of truth.
Blood waters the crop,
Fertile red soil,
Heat rises from the furrows,
The sun casts red light,
Horizon to horizon,
Oh, the fumes! Oh, Deathiculture!
Here all questions are answered. All makes sense all fits. There is peace and happiness here in the fields and crops of infinity.
2
I awoke to a soggy and salty pillowcase. I realized, in a sluggish train of thought, I had cried myself to sleep again. A headache wriggled through my brain. My temples throbbed. My wrinkly shirt now plastered with cold sweat. I could not get myself to think more or do anything just yet. I waited for my heart to stop and to cease breathing completely. I lay there, not knowing what time it was, only knowing with strong conviction that in the next few moments I would surely cease to breathe.
An hour passed, I couldn't tell for certain, but that was how it felt. It felt like a lifetime. Thought I was paralyzed and stuck in limbo (between life and death), a gradual death. With all my senses, I clenched onto it. Gnawing at the rusty hinges which tied me down to my life-force. At last I saw my life seep out, ashes upon ashes of burned fuel in liquid form.
I snapped out of my fantasy to an ambient guitar solo.
“Six am Christmas morning
No shadows, no reflections here
Lying cheek to cheek in your cold embrace… “
Marilyn Manson’s voice seeped out the speakers. His raspy voice accompanying the melody and the lyrics to perfection. A song of diabolical true love burned off its bones. An eclipse of sorrow and pleasure.
“…She pressed a knife against your heart.
Saying ‘I love you so much you must kill me now’ “
It felt like I'm floating. Giddy, it took every ounce of my will and strength to swing my legs out of the bed and touch the cold wooden floor with my toes. Even when that was done a huge part of me stayed behind crippled on the bed. An old wrinkly man with white hair coiled up like a frightened child. He was pale and weak, incapable of controlling his bowel movements. He trembled in the cold and heat, whimpered in the night and day because his anguish and the horrors he has seen never ceased bombarding his mind. He would have gotten out of bed if he could, but he was petrified to severe anxiety. Poor fragile joints and bones that ached with every turn and moment. Because life and nightmares became no different from each other. I carried him with me.
My shoulders slumped and my head heavy, it all started coming back when I stared at the bookcase in front of me. Although with no complete certainty.
I am in my room, I thought, not quite convinced yet.
Couldn’t shake the touch of uncertainty off my back. It would take turning my lights on and scanning the room, looking out the window to see where I was and what time it was, walking into the hallway to check the room number with my name underneath and the two doors besides mine (as if rooms uprooted themselves and moved). Half satisfied, I would return to my room have a glass of water and look under my bed. Then I would sit and brood until the haze is slightly lifted.
3
The bottled water tasted like salvation. I sipped it instead of downing it in one go like most, a habit of mine. As I watched out the window two girls passed by, the one on the further side captivated by what the other was telling her and suddenly she laughed. Her cheeks glowing and by chance she looks up at my window and she paused until out of sight. Was it my starry eyes that caused that? Perhaps sensing my foul nature pouring onto her. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t give a fuck.
“Staring still at the thin fabric of reality?” Macfearson said. I had mistaken his entrance for a note being slid under my door, he was stealthy like that.
“Not really…just thinking.”
“That’s the look of a dark lord you’re wearing, deathling,” He grinned. ”I love it.”
“And I guess you’re here to tease it.” The emotion surging within was pure antipathy and love at the same time.
“Wish I could hate it!” He ambled over. His eyes peering into my heart. He pulled out my scrapbook from under his trench coat, opened it to a specific page and gave it to me. “Lesley Sebeko died in a car crash last Saturday. I added him to the list,” his tone bland. He was not used to suppressing his feelings, he was trying. It was as uncomfortable as putting off going to the toilet to him, he had to relief himself and the only time he did was when my lust was visible. We harboured ill feelings towards each other. We pretended the tension did not exist although we sensed it in the overtones.
I scrolled down the names, newspaper articles, pictures and headlines but could not miss or dismiss the highlighted lines. I had to read them twice each like smelling roses.
Alexis Dune
Raped, eyes gorged and a shattered beer bottle shoved up her vagina.
Thabang Dithebe
His genitals severed and face peeled off.
Mpho Violet
Her head severed and staked through her breasts.
Julia Storm
Baked in the oven just when she turned three…
Hape Juliet…
Page after page, it was appetizing.
“Do you have an idea what we will be looking for today?”
Reluctant to look up from the book I absently replied, “We’ll find out.”
I felt his questioning look on the back of my neck.
“It will make sense when we get there,” I said.
“Are you sure she’s not just assimilating you into one of them?”
“I don’t think so.” Truthfully her intentions weren’t clear to me.
He snorted. “She is sending you to a goddam bar.”
I looked up, a scowl on his face. “She is sending us.”
“You told her about us?”
“No, but we are all in this together aren’t we?”
He shook his head. “I never agreed to any of this.”
“I also never signed off on the sampling. I followed. Thought you would be over this by now, seriously.”
He clenched his fists on the side of his legs and manically grinned. “Alright, alright! I’m coming with you to the bar tonight.” Eyes bulging from his shaking head, stray hairs trembling over his forehead. “Enjoy your book. I’ll see you tonight!”
4
The university, a place which its prime objective is to sell and create new information, failed to solve the problem. Questions which I had assumed were only natural and answerable appeared downright insane. Discovered how lost this place was, declaring the truth to be relative. How could one live in a growing abyss like that?
Intuitively I knew something was off. The calling was all the proof I needed. The wrongness in the world and life itself seeped deep into the cracks; my burden was knowing it.
The calling grew audible with each passing sand of time.
“Jump. Head first, snap your neck and dissolve into bliss. The nothingness, the not being. It is the only way out. You better off dead. No one will miss you, no one will care. The misery, the pain, and the confusion it will slide away. What is life anyway? What is existence?” the calling enticed with its voice, transfixing me.
“What is death? What does it mean? The end of me or bliss and peace?” I asked, staring out the window as the entity slithered beneath the thin fabric of reality.
Then there was a cringing pause. Just then the pain of the calling consumes me. Broody, I cried. Hating myself for existing. There was a bottomless sadness and grief over being so undone.
“No one understands you. They don’t get you. They don’t see you. You are invisible,” tears race down my cheeks as the calling whispered from within. “You don’t deserve anything. You are a freak. A wandering mistake, unlovable, and nothing. Not even the gods who created you can love you. All you give will be taken from you. You will always lose friends and carry this unbearable pain in your soul.”
“Why can’t I be happy?”
“You are incapable of it. How can you even know what is happiness when you do find it if you have never felt it before? You will always be lifeless, lost, and dead inside. Come, come, jump!”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Your very existence.”
“Will death extinguish it?”
“Come, jump!”
“Will it be painful?” My heart thudded.
“Yessss… sweet explosions of pain. It’s the most beautiful thing. No drug can make you feel that good. This does not have to go on. You must break to become less fractured. “
“Will I go home?”
No answer.
“What is the crop?”
No answer.
“How can I trust you?”
Silence, then it slowly spoke, “Look inside yourself.”
“How do I get to the crop?”
Silence.
“You lie, right? You’re lying,” I bawled, trembling to my loins
Silence.
I picked up the razor blade from the windowsill and started slashing my wrist. That way it would leave me alone for a moment. A moment of strange incomplete and murky peace was worth the trouble, always. The hopelessness and helplessness lingered like drug abuse shame.