AMKent books

The Man

Philosophers are always talking in absolutes, and I became the absolute. The rivers are engorged with spirits of the cursed, hollowed, and I walk upon its surface not as Christ, but its antithesis. So, it continues, this final war. If you are to take a swipe at God, you better not miss. Snowfall, the seasons are impartial to the decay, we are forgotten and our lord does not even have the effort to flood us. My skin pricks, taught, veins sink to thin blue silhouettes from superficiality and the bones of my feet and knuckles ache. Shots ring out and I reminded that there is yet a new champion to the afterbirth. Poor disregarded work. I am naked still, my body starved and grainy, high on its own catabolism, I feel fatal. An elderly woman, hunched over in the alley way, wrapped-up and stained, watches me. The soles of my feet crunch the inanimate architectural casualties of violence, and she does not move, stiller still.

“You are the naked hound we have all heard of, but I do not see your aura. Just a man, amongst other men, more evil or less.”

“A hound?”

“Do you think your evils and aspirations haven’t been thought and done in endless iterations? You, an anti-philosopher, sadist, delusions of godly-hood. You are achieving nothing of note, just another lash on the back of a failed race and a poisoned planet. Do whatever evil you justify, and call it what you wish, but you are nothing novel, an imitation of many before.”

I feel my ribs, they jut so viciously that my skin my tear. I am just a man, my first stage is that I accept it.

“Why have I spread?”

She shuffles her legs deeper into the alley.

“You carried the parasite, you play with death as most sadists do. You think you are symbolic, but you are just as tragic.”

I drive my thumbs down the fibres of my thighs, lactic acid drains and replenishes.

“Every evil is an iteration of me, when I housed that parasite, I saw it. My essence has been used by God to be a Satan of sorts. I do not tempt, but it all originates from the woven spark in the mind of the creator, the first thought of destruction was and is me, through many flesh, it is me.”

“The parasite lied to you then, and you are a fool enough to believe it.”

“My Cartesian demon, no. I know that you were beaten by soldiers days before you saw me, I know of you miscarriages, your abuses, your injuries from falling down a hill in youth to gashing your leg on the coffee table before this whole war began. Your husband, an average man who died peacefully of a heart attack in his sleep. I could go on forever, but there are so many of you and so much of me.”

She does not flinch, in-fact, she remains a portrait.

“Then you are soon running out of material.”

“No, I have been fed on scraps, and now I have an appetite. There is more nuance to me than you presuppose, you shall accompany me as we walk to the end of man.”

She folds her arms tight.

“I’m old, beaten, and I have no interest in watching your atrocities.”

I kneel and push her head down; she whimpers from a hoarse, weathered throat as the back of her neck is exposed. Through here I bite. The nerves in my teeth scream with pain, the cold drying whatever moisture my mouth can cling to. The flesh is tough, resistant, but I persist through the sensitivity until at last there is warmth, blood. I draw out and swallow her essence, knowing the soul is hidden in plain sight. The body goes limp. The shell falls to the ground. I feel her settle within me, as the parasite once did.

I leave the alley and move toward the sound of drones and gunfire. Distorted commands stretch through the air. Mechanical suicidal crows buzz overhead. Glass shatters on iced asphalt. The sky is pink with a coming shroud, the tease of architecture lit in instruments of death. Tossing and turning the old lady succumbs to the acidic bondage of her metaphysical prison. Now watch through my eyes, and understand the ark I will create from the leftovers. You will see how I will reach our ignorant God with it.

“A grace is a blessing, even if awful.”

“You drag me here against my will, I look forward to your humiliation.”

It is dark now, and they will learn, and he who learns must suffer.