ayahuasca (fragment)

Ayahuasca, herself, was present before him, around him, within him, a being of troubling beauty, awash with flickering, sliding colours for which he did not yet have names. There were no features visible that Harlan could identify, no details that he could pinpoint, but he was entranced by her beauty all the same.

She spoke without breaking the silence, filling his pulpy, wooden brain with unearthly, but wholly meaningful sounds. Planting the seeds for instructions that he could not yet fully understand, could not yet fully appreciate. Seeds which would in time grow to saplings with the proper sunlight, nutrients, and moisture. Saplings which would in time grow into strong adult trees.

Flash of copper. Suddenly, a giant, lumbering shadow fell over the once tranquil scene, and Ayahuasca vanished without so much as a goodbye leaving Harlan, the once majestic Cyrilla tree, a shivering, shaking, sweating human.

The dreams had stopped, and in their place a dense void took up residence, a veritable black hole, squatted in his unconscious. Ingesting intuition. Consuming common sense. Snacking on his soul. But, something had to be done.

“This was necessary. Sometimes one has to go in and set things straight.”

“I—”

“Now, you will need to be leaving.”

“I don't think I can move.”

“You can not stay here.”

surprise

Before he could even hear them, he could smell them. The familiar scent of deodorant covering body odour, of cigarets, of sweat-stained playing cards. Each carried a distinctive odour, and as Harlan slithered silently through the trees surrounding the clearing, he rifled through the files in his brain to place each scent.

He crept further through the trees in the direction of his prey, and was soon welcomed by another layer of scents. The steel and grease of firearms. Copper bullet jackets. Cordite and nitrocellulose. Fairly standard weapons, all of them. Routine. Nothing to fear. Closer yet, allowing the sounds into his ears for classification. The soft crackling of boots standing on the ground. Trying to be silent.

Almost beside them. Harlan finally spotted the group of men through the trees. Four South Americans standing around an overturned card table, rifles drawn, peering through their scopes into the clearing. They were caught totally outside of any alert mode, Harlan thought. One even had his boots off. Stupid bastard.

Knife out, Harlan flew. Seriously flew, and sliced through both of the bootless man's Achilles tendons before anyone knew what was happening. Screams and pandemonium. The poor sap tried to stand, only to come crashing down. River of blood. The three unmolested men instinctively spun around, letting loose a blind barrage of bullets. One soldier fell to friendly fire. Then another.

Harlan, still hovering close to the ground, plunged his knife deep into the throat of the first downed man before leaping up to engage his remaining enemy in unarmed combat. There was a struggle, and Harlan's hands found their way around his adversary's throat. The man put up a decent fight, but within seconds, he, too, was dead. Choked by Harlan's pitiless hands.

risen

You saw them coming, but they were too many. There was nothing you could do, and you were overpowered, consumed by the moaning, howling masses of walking corpses. And now you're dead. Aren't you? There's a slow reawakening of consciousness. Dead fingers twitch with impossible animation. You hunger. For blood. For meat. For human flesh. You have this insatiable urge, this irresistible craving, to crack open a human skull and scoop out the warm brain matter, liberating it from its bony confines. You rise, supernatural pulses flickering into dead muscles. You rise, and join your new friends, reborn as one of the living dead.

lenses

Mathis had apparently been sleeping for awhile when he woke up with a start, on the floor of his apartment, in the dark, surrounded by mess. The glasses were still on his face. He made no attempt to remove them. It didn't even cross his mind.

His head ached, his eyes burned, and all he could do was to let out a pained groan. This, while memories of his father, recently obtained memories, his father's own memories, horrible memories, came flooding back to him.

He had seen his father's end, the way in which his life was cut short in a dockside knife fight with a two-bit thug. And he had seen something else. His heart began to race just thinking about. He had seen something he couldn't even hope to understand.

Mathis, lying on the floor, lolled his head this way and that, trying to clear his mind of the images his father had seen. Then he stopped. He blinked. He thought back to the old man, and wondered what he had seen in the lenses that was so horrible. The old man had called him the devil, and forbade Mathis from ever doing business with him again. It had to be something pretty bad.

Abruptly blinded by an intense white light, Mathis' entire body again convulsed, his fingers wildly clawing at the carpet once more. Strange images coming into focus. Another's memories. A holiday dinner, surrounded by little kids and laughing adults. Flash. Shady business conducted by the dark light of old storm lanterns from behind iron bars. Flash. Mathis, himself, setting the glasses down on a stone counter. Flash. The old man trying on the glasses, witnessing the bloody hatchet murder of his wife. Flash. Blood, so much blood. Flash. Arms, legs, head being removed with a circular saw. Flash. Flash. Flash.

endings

There is a little bit of comforting myth surrounding endings. We tell ourselves that endings are merely beginnings. We tell ourselves that for a new chapter to start, one must finish. We tell ourselves that a new word begins after the full stop. Period. Two spaces (one, if you're feeling particularly naughty). Capitalise, and begin again. We tell ourselves this because no-one likes to think of something as just being over. No-one likes to feel like there's no going back. We tell ourselves this because it feels good. Truth is, sometimes an ending really is an ending. Sometimes there really is nothing more.

I kissed you goodbye in the sterile airport during a bungled embrace – an embrace halting and clumsy. An embrace made awkward by the bulky books in the pockets of my coat, by the impending end, by the lack of any true emotion left in either of us. Your nose was cold and made me shiver as it made contact with my cheek. We both new that there was no more. You would get on the plane, and take off into the air, while I would not even stick around to watch the plane taxi down the runway. In fact, before your luggage was even loaded into the cargo hold, I was in the backseat of a cab telling the driver to take me downtown. And right around the time the wheels of your plane were leaving concrete, I was hoisting a fresh pint of lager to my lips. We both smiled then. We both let loose a sigh of relief. We never saw each other again. Now, that's an ending.

Taphonomy

The night was a corpse. So still, one may have been inclined to check its pulse, panicky fingers fumbling at its wrist in search of a heart beat. Or to check for even the shallowest breath from its lifeless, cold lips. Or to, at the very least, kick its foot and wait for a response. But none would come. No, the night could not have been more still – for nothing is as still as death.

But, it's only inevitable that tranquillity eventually turns to commotion. Even in death, calm ultimately moves over for disturbance. And when this disturbance begins, it builds so easily. Easier than school of piranha swimming downstream, easier than a vulture flying with the wind – it comes easily.

After death, nothing can stop the rot, the decomposition. One dies, and in that instant, there is a coming apart, a breaking down into simpler forms of matter. Things begin to move. Autolysis: one's internal enzymes and chemicals begin to break down one's own tissues. Putrefaction: bacteria consume. Then the scavengers come. There's an unbuilding, a dispersal, and a scattering amongst the still living, reborn.

Daylight does come.

(h)ex

Something just wasn't right. But not in the 'walked on the clean floor with muddy boots, forgot to feed the dog, reused a theatre ticket, misplaced my truck keys' kind of way. No. Worse than any of that. This was more of a 'surfed porn on my boss's computer, hit a parked car and left the scene, stole from the tip jar, slept with my best friend's wife' kind of wrongness. A strange overwhelming desire to apologise. To someone. Anyone. Just as soon as I could figure out who it was I had wronged – and what it was that I had done exactly.

To say my head hurt would have been a gross understatement of the facts. Due to the tens of thousands of years that mankind has been treating his taste buds to all manner of fermented bevvies, all of the good comparisons have been used and reused. Head in a vice. Hammer to the head. Hit by a car. A bus. A Tractor trailer. Throbbing, pulsating, pain. If I were a cartoon character, the artist would depict me with saggy, baggy, bloodshot eyes, tousled hair, and little bubbles floating around my head. 

Shit.

Looking in the mirror in my en-suite, I'd be damned if the cartoonists didn't have it right.

I took some acetaminophen with a gulp of cold water, hoping I'd have to the strength of stomach to keep the pills down. Next, I rattled some ibuprofen out of the plastic container and down my raw throat just in case the first pills didn't work. Tried to drink as much of the water as I could. Emptied my bladder, my bowels, and tried to do the same with my mind before heading back to bed with plans of staying there until the late afternoon.

Goddammit.

Something wasn't right. Something. Sweating beneath the covers, head pounding, stomach churning, I could not shake the feeling that I had somehow screwed something up. I fumbled around in the dark, searching for my mobile on the night stand, and scrolled through my address book, squinting at the too-bright screen.

“Seth, dude, how're things?” I croaked.

“You sound like shit, man.”

“I feel worse. How're you feeling?”

“My mouth tastes like I've been chewing on decaying dog rectums.”

“That's bad,” I said, swallowing back some bile. “Hey, so, some night last night, hey?”

“Meh,” Seth sighed. “It was all right. You were pretty loaded, though, eh?”

My stomach was knotting up so bad. Chest tightening. What did he know?

“Oh yeah? I didn't feel too bad,” I lied. “Felt pretty sober most of the night, actually.”

Pause.

“Yeah, me too. Taking it kind of easy, I guess.”

I was breathing a little easier. Surely if I had done something horribly stupid, he'd have brought it up straight away. But, I had to go for it.

“Hey, Seth, was I being an asshole last night or anything? Did I do anything stupid that you know of?”

Pause.

“Uh, nope, I don't think so.”

I sighed. Sweet relief.

“Man,” he said, “even after Cara showed up, you were fine. Shit, you two were even getting along for once.”

Cara. Oh my god.

“Not sure what happened to her, though,” Seth continued. “Kind of disappeared a little before we took off.”

Oh. My. God. Cara.

Down the hall, in the main bathroom, someone turned the shower on, as memories trickled back to my alcohol riddled brain. Wandering hands and sly smiles. Compliments and reminiscences. Cara. My ex. Oh man. I could smell her, then. In my room. In my bed. I leant over, almost cautiously, and pressed my nose into the pillow beside me. Sandalwood. Patchouli. Cara. I smelt a big, big mistake.

And I owed myself one major apology.