Stitch

( I wrote this at the International Horror Con the year it was in Salt Lake.  One of the attending artists had requested to use it a study, for a class, thus the illustration notes below the story, but he never followed up on it. )

Taste of copper and chocolate…migraine bright flash before my eye…crisp apple burst of pain.

Are you here? I know you’re here. I can feel you on my skin. But why is it so dark?

Another silver sharp flash, followed by the pain…and another, and again. Are these artifact…or memory?

Flash. Pain. Flash. Pain. Flash…

I know this rhythm. Shining sharp tip dives through the white, pulling thick soft blackness behind.

A comforting thing…a pulling together. But what are we building?

Am I speaking? I know you hear me. -I- can’t hear me. You hear me. But…am I speaking?

Cold copper pools beneath my tongue, waveless, motion free. Where is the air? Where the light?

Where…am… I?

(( What I’m thinking of, here, is a visual/visceral continuation of the theme of the flash…stark black and white line drawings, almost woodcut style. Extreme close-ups. The corner of a stitched together eye, the mouth, half sewn half gaping open, a cross of thread at the corner, the other eye, staring blindly, etc. Never a hint of the stitcher, just the one, alone…except for the needle. Maybe even a bit of a sharp glinting tip, or a trailing tail of thread… ))

Madness takes its toll. Exact change only, please!

The sun is coming up. I can see the light through the window, where the cardboard’s lifted up, in the bottom corner. It makes a shape like a piece of pie…with jagged edges. Kind of pretty.

Next to me, I can hear them breathing…rattling, dying breaths, but breathing still, for all that. Someones leg is thrown across mine. I -think- there’s a body attached, but I can’t be certain, as I can’t turn my head to look. I think my hair’s stuck to the floor…I don’t want to pull, in case it’s my head, instead.

It’s quiet. Last night, just hours ago, it was so loud. Like all the demons from all seven-thousand hells were torturing a million typewriting monkeys with jackhammers and machine guns. Especially the machine guns. And now it’s so quiet.

Quiet enough to hear the drip, drip, drip of some fluid onto an empty gas can…might be blood, might be gas, might be just water…who knows. Quiet enough to count the rattling inhalations of the dying, who lie strewn in careless heaps all around me. Quiet enough to hear the distinct -absence- of sirens, screaming through the morning…

Not that I expected any different. Truth be told, if they -had- shown, it’d probably be worse for us all. The Man, in all his myriad forms and faces, has never had a soft spot for those of us who choose to live…off the path.

And what could they do, really? The Shades are all -long- gone, of course…all but those two or three we managed to hit, who most likely lie mingled in death in the ways they most protested in life. They call us “Monkey Men”, when they come.

They say we kowtow to the Man…and because we only steal from the Sheep, let them provide us a living, instead of slaughtering them every chance we get, they say we are the enemy. They are the New Man, according to their tracts. The Next Man. I say, if you kill off all the sheep, on what will -you- feed? Each other? Most likely.

They are the Shade…silent as the shadows, deadly as the dark at the end of a Redmond alley. We are…or should I say were…much less organized. A loose affiliation of Rats and other assorted rodents-in-the-walls. Grouped together on the edges of what passes for society these days, preying on the Sheep, avoiding the Lions, and hiding from the all-seeing eyes of the Man.

It’s been mostly a silent war, till now…a war of attrition…both sides careful not to attract outside attention. Until last night. Until they came in force, guns and eyes blazing, and only left once the last of us lay bleeding and broken on the floor. They’re not afraid, anymore. Something happened.

I wish I could stand up, I’d tell someone…grab the nearest Sheep and shake it into him, frighten him until it stuck. They’re not afraid anymore. They’re just hungry. And you’re next.