Air sucked back into the room. Sound returned. He could see; he could breath; he could speak.
Where once sat the woman of skin and shadow was now a void, a cavern of flesh where the couch had been, its walls glistening with wetness.
When he was two, his mother fell down the steps with him in her arms. Or maybe she threw him.
The opening seemed to cast light and dark at once, the light easing his mind, the dark both drawing him in and repulsing him. He stepped forward. Forward again. Its walls quivered as he neared. He could hear the rush of blood within.
When he was six, he was stung in the face by a bee.
His hands trembled. He touched the pale, shivering structure before him, felt its warmth, felt that it was truly as it seemed – flesh fused with his home, leading to where, he did not know – and he began to push himself inside. He gasped.
When he was eight, he awoke to shots in the night. After the red lights and police left, he snuck into his older brother’s room and saw the brain matter still clinging to the walls, blasted there by his brother’s own hand.
The cavern enveloped him. He expected a rush of claustrophobia but experienced none. Only comfort. It felt familiar, somehow. He pushed forward. Forward. Forward to an end he could not foresee. He began to hear her voice again, yet it sounded distant. So distant. He went to it.
When he was eleven, he felt things he could not explain when he sat a certain way.
Inward. Inward. “Do you understand?” He did not. “Do you see now?” He did not. “Do you wonder?” He did.
When he was thirteen, he daydreamed of dying.
He did not understand but worked his way inward anyway, searching, probing for an answer. An answer to the lights; to the frozen limbs and silent screams that defined his nights; to the visions of distant worlds and destroyed moons. All of this was happening for a reason. The voices and visitors, the memories true and false.
When he was sixteen, he daydreamed of dying.
Pressed against this pulsing path, his body felt slick and unclean — but he was used to being unclean. Unclean was his state of being, body and mind. He knew that now. He had always known that. He was tainted; diseased; dirty.
When he was eighteen, he daydreamed of dying.
“I’m going to show you,” the voice said, “and when you understand you will be changed, and it will be good. The world will be reborn, and it will be good. You will see with new eyes, and it will be good. I will be freed, and it will be.”
When he was twenty, he lay in a pool of vomit, a bottle of pills just out of his grasp, a note on the table explaining his reasons to die.
“I will show you.”
He reached the end. His body slid out of the tunnel with a wet sound. A chamber opened before him, black and charred. A fire had swept through this room. Inside, a figure sat on a wooden stool.
It looked just like him, but its eyes were blood.
end part 5 – part 6
