Food For Thought

By Succubus

The brilliance of the sunlight, which had shined the world to a thing of beauty, mocked the man whose mind was a landscape of shadows and ashes.  The sweet smell of flowers turned rancid and rank in his nostrils; he could smell only decay.

He knew the truth, understood the secret:  the world as it glowed in all its glory for him this morning, was but a dream—the hallucinations of a madman.  The chirping birds, the smiling old women, the cloudless sky, all were lies; lies sent to blind man from the truth of his reality, to blind us all from the horror of our own existence. 

He could hide from the truth no more.  The rot he smelled came from without as well as within. 

The world was fertilizer, and everything in it, each man, woman and child, were putrefying.  Always we were feeding the earth in its endless hunger; enormous was its appetite to swallow lives whole. 

A young mother approached, pushing before her a child, squalling in its fury.  He saw the young woman for what she was: saw the skin as it peeled away, saw the flesh rotting off, her skull shining through, her eyes filled with the maggots of death.  She smelled of fear. The man knew the infants anger, echoed it daily in the voices screaming in his mind.  The infant too, could see the world for the monster it was, the child bawled in frustration knowing its life to be pointless, knowing his flesh to be a meal for the earthworms

He smiled at the crying baby as it passed, or at least cracked apart his lips and snarled his teeth in the closest imitation of a smile he could remember.  The child screamed harder and the man looked up, feeling the menace from the trees overhead, feeling the growling in the gut of the lawn, and crossed hastily to the other side of the street. 

Counting out his steps, staring at the sidewalk, he walked on, careful not to step on a crack (break your mothers back), eyeing the weeds that even here ate away at the cement, tore it in chunks, and pushed resolutely up between the cracks it had made.  The hunger of earth was too palpable to the man, the pressure of it weighed down his steps. 

The question he was here to ask was inevitable, the entirely of his life had been a posing of this query.  Why, knowing the truth of life, should he continue?  Why, knowing the outcome is but the end, should he bother to live at all?

And on this day, he could find no answer.  Though he looked around, though he looked inside, no longer could the man justify his own existence, no more could he continue a living lie. 

Many of the walking dead threw him curious glances, some friendly and some filled with the misdirected rage that he himself had thought was for other man, but in truth was for the lie.  The rage will keep you alive years after you’ve wanted to stop living.  The rage will give you targets and meaning, but in the end there always comes the anguish and the final truth:  Nothing of who we are matters, nothing of our being has ever really lived.  Birth is a death sentence.

He perched on concrete steps, his mind wrapped thick with his anger, letting it simmer for a time.  He screamed at the tree across the street, and saw its limbs shimmer and stretch, reaching still for him.  As he sat, he saw how the grass grew longer, felt it creeping closer, swallowing all it passed along the way.  As he sat his fear diminished not at all, but his conviction grew.  The only freedom he could attain is the death that served their purpose.  He’d thought and thought, but he could see no way to cheat the earth of it’s sustenance, no way to deny it the meal of his flesh.  Even his ashes would happily serve the cannibal Nature. 

The only benefit was the end, simple and beautiful.  The end: unable to serve any purpose, unable to desire anything more than the nothingness of not being.

Slowly the man walked, gently the tears started to flow down his cheeks.

Those who passed the man that day could feel his sadness.  They felt a guilt inside, a judgment.  A defining moment occurred for those people.  They could look at him and think, I am lucky, my life is not his, I am better than he is, stronger than this weak man. Gone he should be.  Looking into the broken man’s eyes was too much a reflection of their own defeats.  His sadness echoed their own, his rages were theirs.  They were forced to acknowledge another and themselves, and for that they resented the man in his lost life. 

A relief was growing inside the man; his steps grew stronger as he walked towards his death—his release.  He was for this one moment, not hopeless, not completely out of control of life.  For one moment, at the end of his life, he could make perfect sense of the moment, could decide what would happen next. 

The darkness of his house sat as rotten and dank as the darkness of his soul.  Today was the first day he had left it in months.  And today will be the last.  If there is any mercy to be found in death, let it all disappear.  Please, give me that mercy, let it all disappear.  Desperately the man prayed; to what, he didn’t care. 

His hands shook as he wrapped the rough hemp tightly around the beam.  His fear grew larger and larger, threatening to swallow him up and bind his hands.  He stood for a moment and stared at the rope, watching it dangle from the ceiling.  He cried harder, for himself, for no one else:  tears and sobs and emotion for the loss of a life that was never lived, of a dream that is cursed to never come true.  He cried for the lie that had taught him to hope and want for something more than what it could ever give. 

Gently he placed one boot upon the table, then the other, and stared at the loop as though it were the eye of the beast.  He caught the image of himself in a mirror across the room and knew finally, how right it was.  How fitting.

He placed the rope around his neck, snug against his throat.  Closing his eyes so as not to watch, he stepped from the table, knocking it down.  The rope was instantly tight about his neck, the pressure incredible and painful.  The fall itself was not enough to kill him: mercy had never been so kind to the man.  Slowly the man strangled, the blood and saliva dripping from his lips, the color slowly leaving his face, until, at last, the darkness came and with it purely nothing.