Infinite Sky

Dripping, covering everything, foetid damp, foetid smell, foetid life. Dripping.

Dank, cool and spread with the covering of night. Lasting longer here than it would elsewhere. No sounds of the swell in that sea-cave. No sounds of the wind in that hill-cave. No sound at all but breath and shuffle. Dank.

Cold to the rotting bones. Pulling at the sinew, teeth pushing through flesh that gives-way before the gums do. Pulling needily at the succouring feast but carefully, lest the teeth rip loose and end future harvestings. Not that these op-or-tuni-ties are frequent. They are not. These are the first horrid mouthfuls he's consumed in weeks. It's lucky the walls are damp enough to lick else even this existence would be a losing game. But no, he's winning.

Angels visit his sleep and tell him that the course of true love is never a smooth path. It is one that must be borne as the labours of birth or the hacking of death must be. For life is pain and there is not one moment of joy without that we must be prepared for torment, anguish, embarassed suffering, shame and damnation. He doesn't like these angels, they depress him.

He awakens only to find that the rocks are pressing-in even closer about him. The roof is lowering, increment by increment. At first he thought it was madness driving him to another obsession. But no, he cannot even stand-up straight now. And the rocks aren't falling, there has never been any sound. They are moved while he sleeps and dreams of angels. Same as the wriggling furry corpses are left for him as he dreams of love. He scratches, he sighs, he rolls and relaxes. Two more weeks to go.

He knows this because he's been collecting the bones as he eats and marking the days with them. He hasn't had enough bones to mark off every day so he's been stretching his mind to think up ways of adding and multiplying to make an invisible abacus of entrailed structures in the Ebon stink. A rat's collar bone broken in two tells him that the final fortnight is upon him. She promised him this and he trusts her like no other.

He has never met her, face to face. Only photographs of her alluring planes ebbing and flowing like the sand-dunes of far-off Africa. The thrust of a cheek; the upturned bowl of a breast; the curve of an eye; the heft of a strong thigh, sand-tinted against the chiffon of imagination. Tantilisation. He's met her at interview, but his eyes were put-out at that stage as a test of his commitment. He passed. He's going to win this.

He contemplates his future. An infinite sky, soaring beyond the visible horizons, reaching out beyond the stars to the ever-curving edge of the universe. Inhabiting every colour of the rainbow and every pulse of every creature of every type. He truly believes this. Where Gautama succeeded in becoming as nothing to join the Eternal Bliss, he was going to become as everything. Same result really except that intead of ultimate peace he sought ultimate power. Becoming the positive and negative charge, the yin and the yan, the binary field that forces grammar on the void.

The angels come once more, though this time he is awake. They whisper in his ear that he is nearly there, that she will be coming soon to reward him with the prize that is rightfully his. That he shall own her and through their joining the world will expand outwards, sight restored, a big bang of consciousness taking him into everything. He thanks the angels and they weep into his eyes, restoring them to their natural majesty. He whispers sweet words of praise and they vomit their love into his throat. He grasps their hands and they squeeze his fragile bones to the marrow. If only for one moment he feels doubt. The doubt releases, swept away. And it is gone and he has won.