{ the beast ; calypso

Disaster is painted in my head. It is ash that I see, and it bathes everything. I see pieces of wood, broken off by a terror, blackened by the hunger of the flames. I can see their fangs and their tongues, dripping with gasoline. I can see their relentless attacks, how they move like furious red vipers. And it is not just sight that betrays me.

I hear it, too. The crackling of the flames are a chorus of snarls and growls from feral wolves. I can hear them, devouring everything that dares cross its path- wood, grass, flowers, flesh. Agony is the flood that wrecks this place. Screams punch the air and it shatters shatters shatters like thin glass. They puncture my eardrums, and blood bubbles from the wound. It splits off into two thick rivulets and leaks down my neck.

I smell it, too. It fills my nose like a great black sea, and it knows no mercy; it is relentless. It is bitter and sour and it stings, like someone is pricking the inside of my nose with a million needles. Smoke covers everything. It is more than a blanket of charcoal clouds, more than a mist that wraps its coveting arms around everything it can hold. This is darkness, not like the night, but like a void. No, not like. It is a void.

I taste it, too. It is bitter and revolting on my tongue. When I inhale, it is like I am consuming smoke, and in turn, it consumes me. It is not the pleasant smoke from a campfire or a cookout- like an embrace. This taste is pitch black as night, and it summons bile running up my throat from deep within. Everything about it is repugnant- but there is no escape, no end.

I feel it, too. It does not crawl up my flesh, but I feel it, in every bone, every vein, every fiber of me. I reach out my hand, and it coils around my fingers like vines. But it does not burn, it does not ignite me. Fire cannot hurt me. (But it sure can hurt those around me.) The smoke that fills every inch of the church and the air around it brushes my skin like a gentle caress. But it is not. Its touch is an omen, a threat.

All of my senses have waged war against me.

She carved the image there with her words- the hideous truth. It takes over. It is a tyrant.

"I did it, Calypso.
I burned down the church," she confessed, finally breaking to the will of the truth. (Ugly, ugly, ugly.)

I wanted to scream, but there was a knife lodged in my windpipe and all the air had been stolen from my lungs by her words. (They were quite the crooks.) I wanted to cry, but my eyes had dried up and glazed over from staring off into space for so long- they had turned into a pair of blue glass orbs, and nothing more. I wanted to fall over, to collapse to the floor, but my body was paralyzed by the shock gripping me with its claws. It did not release me until I was bleeding bleeding bleeding.

So I drowned myself in silence and let the images consume me, and then destroy me, from the inside and out.

When words find me, when my mother has stopped shaking me, demanding that I speak, they do not slice into the air as I intend. They are marred- they are ruins. My voice is the clang of a crowbar against a rusty pipe.

"N . . . o."

And that is when shock unlocks my cage with a snicker, and I collapse to the floor. Its claw marks leave me bathed in my own blood, covered almost completely by my own wounds. They threaten to become septic, but my mind cannot pay much attention to anything but the agony, ripping throughout every shattered piece of me. It is in my lungs. It grips them, leaves them forlorn and tattered. And it does not cease there, no, it moves onto my heart and twists it inside out until it becomes n o t h i n g but half-void, half-ruins.

Ruin.

That is what is makes me.

[presto][/presto]