Combatwoundedveteran Folded Space: Mapping Unexpected Ordinance
There were giant squid for 27 days in August &
September. My bathwater multiplied into oceans when I
blinked. It was always dark, and the moon followed the
same pattern as reality. I built fear into unknown
shapes, several, they worked in unison; coiling around
my limbs, ribbon filaments that moved as invertebrates.
Tendon and muscle, without joints.
Always night, I step in a puddle it is an ocean, the
rain starts and floods everything. The sinks fill, sea
level is mine every night. 27 days of it.
I had these enemies and at the beginning the moon was
small, I had no light, treading seas that exploded
moments prior. I introduced myself to panic, I said
hello. At this came motion beneath me, and the touch of
smooth flesh, wrapping around elements of my body, and
they touched my genitals, tightening around abdomen.
Underwater, gagging and blind. REPEAT.
The time I spent in the agreed upon continuity found me
getting dirty, as I had been avoiding liquids, and more
irrational. I stopped brushing my teeth, no liquid
soap. No bar soap with liquid catalyst. No one came
near me, my odor was weaponry. Work had no more use for
me and soon I slept outside sprawling in beds of dirt,
hugging it to me. When the rains came, I was forced to
use pills to battle sleep. But I could not win, and
again I was killed.
And I struggled on trying not to die, to be drowned,
strangled, and chewed, concurrently. My only comfort
the patches of dry earth I found to sleep in, feeling
strong. They killed me anyway, the moon opening now,
them becoming visible, only to disappear. They had ways
of creating their own shadows. I saw only the stray
pieces that flashed outside the black cloud they
projected. No weakness, and in their element, I was
continually murdered.
I did not know how many times I could die, the deaths
were growing tedious. Maddening. I tried to kill
myself, at first water, as far down as I could go and
did not go back up. My skull was just beginning to go
numb, and it was on me soon eating most of my leg.
Suicide was failure and I was truly f..cked.
I woke up, walked to street and waited for a car. Fifty
miles an hour, one was coming. I took a step, was off
my feet for a few seconds, then face first, onto the
road, with my legs coming down over my head, bent
backwards, in half. I wanted it done, but it wasn't.
There was no pain, nothing broken, get up, walk back
inside. I took a knife out of the drawer and into my
stomach. Nothing. My gun tried to put a bullet into my
face and failed. I appeared doomed only to die with my
nightmares, and now I knew. I needed as much light and
emaciated earth as I could find my element and
strength. The desert and the open skies followed the
lunar cycle to the desert near the canyons and rock
formations. My savior smiled back, parched and
beautiful. The sun was falling. I gathered rocks and
laid them out into humans. I took position among them.
No water for miles. I closed my eyes.
The moon was bright overhead when I heard it coming,
the first drops of rain beginning. It had come in on
storm clouds that were fast closing in on the moon and
casting great shadows towards me. The downpour started,
attempting to flood me out. I stood and the long dead
land resisted, shifting enormous tectonic plates, the
water running between them. I turned to the stones.
They formed and rose with me as it fell to the ground
gasping and flailing parts. We stood over it, a feeble
spray of ink marking paths in the defiant soil. A pile
of pale flesh shivering and caking with dirt. I took a
rock to one of it's eyes. The others long appendages
from it and threw them to the sky. The fear was gone, I
beat my fists on it. The rain stopped. The others
backed away, howling and ripping everything from inside
it's shell, I was covered in fluid and bits of organs.
Again I turned to the stone men and we lifted the giant
husk. We carried it to the rock formations and dropped
it. The stone men dissolved back into the landscape. I
climbed onto the shell and smiled. I waited for the
sun.