[Short Story] Job Requirements For The Destroyer of Worlds

snowmachine (64)in #writing • 7 years ago (edited)

Remember that you did not catch her when she fell, because you wanted to suck the broken marrow out of her spine. You suppressed a smile at every car accident, and your mother “Just knew something was wrong with you.” The floor of your home is littered with animal bones and broken tusks and the furs of snow leopards, and when you cross the room to turn on the television you see the picture frame turned to face the wall, covered in brown paper, and you know you should’ve thrown it out years ago because it is a picture of the one you let fall. Yet every-time you attempt to throw it out, to burn it, break it, you imagine rupturing her face with your fist like another car accident.

And, you just can’t.

When the maelstrom of crows attacked your high school during a pre-calculus exam, you imagine that you were the one that caused it. When the crows die at your feet, the pre-calculus teacher calls you a monster and later at home, somewhere around midnight with the moon like a purple swathe at her feet, she puts poison in her tea and drinks it while listening to a dead channel on the radio. And the girl who’d been sitting next to you, attempting to copy off your answers, knelt sobbing at your feet and picked up a dead crow, rocking back and forth on her knees. Later you found she disappeared - was last seen on the Telmac Bridge, looking at the churning, animal angry river below.

If you are THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS that we’re looking for, you’ll know because you’ve carried the ghosts of the ones you killed for years, like a swelling husk on your back. And either they, or you, you’re not for certain, cannot let go.

People will often tell you, looking out of windows on misty mornings as they caress a cup of coffee, “Some people are just born wrong.” They will say this as if they’re speaking to no one in particular, as if they’re often prone to pronouncements of pithy judgement in the morning. But whenever you’re around them they bite down on their cheeks and grip their throats and their stomachs churn as if they’ve swallowed hair and nettles and dirt and the mass is about to burst.

You fell in love with a blind girl who did not see the animals that died around you, who did not have to stare into eyes that others say “squirmed like blood hit with venom.” You took her to your favorite place in the mountains and you taught her how to identify the flowers by touch and smell, tucked a yellow buttercup behind her ear and kissed her chin.

And when you made love she told you that underneath her fingers your skin must be what color felt like, like buttercups pushing up through permafrost, like the tiniest butterflies struggling through ecdysis.

And later as you lay together naked in the meadow, you ran your fingers through the sparks of dew on her spine and she told you that when she dreamed she dreamed of deep outer space and of a whispering god that was sprung out of the music. “In the beginning there was the word and the word was the Jazz Ensemble.”

You imagined sewing her up into lace and kissing her feet as you fitted her for white satin heels. You imagined applying nude lipstick to her warm face, kissing away the sunspots, brushing her hair until it shone. You wanted to take this blind, shy girl who’d been locked away and make the world dance for her. She would be your blind queen, your Calypso, your heathen witch - she who dreamed of the universe springing out of the head of a saxaphone.

But you did not catch her when she fell.

Realize that all the portents and the signs - the hurricanes that followed you, men rising from their graves - the birthmarks, the caul around your head, the blood sacks, the crying children, the sociopathic tendencies, the witch women who blow into your third eye and tell you there is a cavern inside - cannot make you a DESTROYER OF WORLDS. These are only the beginning, the possibilities. You could turn back at anytime. You could go back to the mountain and strip off your human skin, live among the goats on the steppe, cut off your tongue, drink spring water. You could take the husk of dead bodies attached to your back and drop it with all that was left of your former life.

But then you get a phone call. And at that precise moment, you’re standing in your living room, and your hand is hovering in front of the photograph, resisting the urge to throw it out. And on the other end of the phone is a man with a voice vibrating at three dissonant frequencies. And he says, “Come to Ravenna Park,” then hangs up.

And when you get to Ravenna Park, the slide and the playground is gone, replaced with black tent walls and an altar piled with nude, naked women. And you can’t help yourself, you look for your blind girl in the mass of flesh. They’re bound and gagged but they do not squirm. They do not cry. They have eyes like gelatin. You trace the bloodied sigils on the floor with your fingers searching for something familiar. You think, “Every moment has led me up to this moment.” At this time, you no longer believe in all possibilities - because they’ve collapsed, and each decision has converged into a singular point. You, like the goats on the side of the mountain, cannot walk backwards.

A creature materializes in front of the altar, a creature with ancient goat horns dripping with black meat. He too, is nude, and when he breathes ragged snot drips from his nose. He holds a pike in one hand, and it’s still glistening wet with blood. On his stomach is the universal magical symbol for PORTAL. You expect him to smell like offal and flesh, but he smells

Of spring flowers. Of bright color.

He says, IF YOU’RE GOING TO ACCEPT YOUR DESTINY YOU SHOULD BE QUICK ABOUT IT. MY SCHEDULE IS FULL TODAY.

If you are THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS we’re looking for, you will be prompt. You will not flinch or hesitate when he hands you the pike and tells you to cut her head off. You do not have to say “Which one?’ looking at the silent mass of bodies, because you will know. It will be the one that looks like her, the one whose eyes do not contract in the light. And you will lift the pike above your head, not feeling the weight of it, only feeling the shadows flitting at the base of your spine, with their dog teeth and needles for tongues, as you spray the walls.

If you are THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS we want, when the creature disappears you will pull her headless body from the altar and kneeling on the floor, cradle her soft limbs to you. You will remember peach and nude lipstick, you’ll remember you once dreamed of dressing her in lace. And as the primordial folds of space and time collapse around your planet, and you can hear the echoing screams of an entire dying race, you’ll wonder, maybe this could’ve all been avoided if only you caught her. If only you’d let her be your goddess. She would not have minded the tendrils of fur sprouting from your body, the horns growing in. If only you hadn’t gotten hungry for the nectar of her innocent blood.

And as your fellow demons crawl through the cracks that your sacrifice have created, dragging away an entire race to spend an eternity upon an eternity in the pleasurepain of an ethereal nightmare, you suppress a sob. It’s okay, DESTROYER OF WORLDS, we understand that often during this stressful period difficult and conflicting emotions will occur.

You drink the blood from her still bleeding neck, and think, perhaps you and her could have ruled this world, together. Maybe you wouldn’t have gotten bored, sitting on a throne built on a mountainside, using your chaotic birthright to keep together the barely-there barriers of the realm as your blind faery, your beautiful blind lily, lay next to your every night with her warmth stirring your heart to continue pumping blood.

You think, maybe I could have saved this world, instead of destroying it.

But you wouldn’t let that happen, DESTROYER OF WORLDS.

You ruin everything.

Follow me on twitter, facebook, or on my website. You can also buy my books here
Stock photo from Pixabay
Self portrait by me canon t51