AMKent books

The Recursive & Damned

I come to a stop as my leg is seized, yet all I had walked through were torn and dismembered. Upon looking down, I see a woman, her hand is firm in its grasp but what lies beneath her pelvis is ruin. I turn and feel a pang that I had not been struck with since childhood, it is fleeting but poignant enough to sizzle in the depths of my senses. Something that anatomically violates nature but refuses to succumb to its end, the refusal of death. Her eyes are glazing, she is fighting that extracting greed of mortality. I kneel down and place my hand on hers, it grows colder by the moment and the warmth of my palm is not enough to slow its descent. A cricket had left rubble and debris scattered, biting into the concrete bollard beside us.

“I was building a conservatory, I was going to have a child.”

Her grip loosens and she joins the dead. I feel my eye leak and a thick pulsating lump writhe around in my throat.

Empathy? Do I see empathy from The Hound?

I don’t know why, hag. I am just as surprised as you. But, I feel something debilitating cripple my dissociation.

What a puzzle you are.

I walk from the strewn bodies and watch as bursts of smoke spit from the walls followed by the whimpering of the men within them. A man in tattered jeans clutches his inner thigh, he has been nipped by a stray bullet and bleeds heavily. He locks onto my gaze and I watch the excavation of his animation with no emotional residue. There is a child’s legs peaking from the doorway of what once was a shop, a man sits beside them fully in view. His skin is grey and the pupils are a distinct tar black, as all child killers possess. Look, hag. Look at how full of life he is, strong as an ox, fuller than he has ever been. Physical satiation feeds from the souls of others.

I see a man sickened by his own actions, desperately justifying evil as survival.

It was his cousin, he thought he would save him from the horrors of man by ending it before the little boy witnessed them. An altruistic choice, maybe the most of all. God is forcing the creation to show its hand. These things are often the case in times of war, cyclical horrors, martyrdoms, love, ideology, all the classics.

I see your joy of rot has returned.

I take no joy from this, but it is eternal and to ignore it is to be ignorant of the intricacies of the soul. It is hidden by those who create it, and when it is found it sickens the human because it reminds us there is an expiry date on good and not evil. The rulers are where they are because they know that it is easier to indulge in the spirit before its fermentation, than to prevent its spoil through virtue.

Power corrupts, this is nothing new.

Not just power, that is a minimalist telling of this process. The structures of man are tuned so that those who harbour taboo ideations hold special ground, then they breed others like themselves, reserving endless spots for the damned kin. A bittersweet siren call, so that they sleepwalk through the devils masturbation. You’d think even Satan was ashamed?

You are not provoking me, just fancy wrapping when evil is no present.

Ha! My dear, you are more entertaining than any of these things could be.

That woman before, she reminded you of someone. Your mother? A love? A sister? A niece? Whoever it was, you related to that loss. Mirror it to the loss of these men and women now, your eyes gave way from her touch, you are no better than this.

I am a part of creation, and because of this, I too, feel its breath upon my nape.

Good, then your ark isn’t about escaping for superiority. You were cursed with an endless knowledge of man.

I ate the fruit, it was ripe and hopeful. Then, it did rot within me.

So you will craft your ark and sail away. You are beyond redemption, beyond reversing the fermentation of the soul. Your only hope is escape from it all, to confront the very being that even made it possible to be so repugnant, and force them to let you get away.

You have me figured out?

There are no devils or gods, the soul isn’t an essence that expires and nature does not weigh your failures. No justice comes for us, not true eternal justice. Evil is optional and to some degree inevitable, it falls within our modus operandi, a binary of the lived. I cannot forgive you, you cannot forgive yourself, you do not need forgiveness or permission to be redeemed. All you can do is castrate your capabilities of spreading that darkness, that is the last thing worth doing.

I almost had hope for you, but you lost it. I wish to confront the creator for its conditions within creation, as you proposed. But evil, redemption, forgiveness, stopping my autonomy? Come, hag, I have much to show you.