He'd remembered neighborhoods. Towns. Rural cul de sacs where people on bikes could pass joggers and angry little dogs in early autumn. He remembered a lot of the time before, and it was strange that even on the island, he thought of those places. He had been trying to pinpoint the exact qualities of what he associated with the word home. Deus had a funny way of lowering your standards with everything. A dorm was good enough. Passing relationships were good enough. A short nod at someone's name after they long passed, somewhere as a pile of buried dust without a headstone was good enough. Even the towns were considered luxury because no one had faith in anything being lasting.
It was the perfect place really. The shortness of if all.
As he stood in the middle of town in what might have once been a four-way stop, he thought of the depressing thought that this town had been built with the thought that it would last. It had to have occupied lots of people, many hunters, and tragedy came to level it down to the broken brickwork of their foundations. Sometimes you could still see a lampshade half-stuck in the mud of someone's overgrown living room or a picture frame with the paper long since sun-bleached to be unrecognizable. They built their lives on the crumbling past of those before them who had also hoped for happiness and security.
Only for it to be a lie.
It was still raining, and he stood as he watched the roads go from pieces of road to thick mud, and started walking, looking out from one house to another. A larger one - maybe a family home. A smaller one - single? One that might have been for apartments. Shadowlings darted between the ruins, and he occasionally shot at them to clear his way and to keep them from gathering in a group to follow him.
Among the collapsed roofs and vine-covered walls looking through shattered window panes, he could spot the few houses rebuilt over the past few years standing up, nicely painted and compete. It was jarring to see them stand like the homes skipped over from a tornado, passed over by luck alone. This time.
What was it about those here that wanted to make something in the path of danger? To hope for something knowing it could be stripped away in an instant? Did he even have that kind of strength and delusion?
Or maybe it was that nothing else would suit them? Nothing else would fit? That they wanted to claim something for themselves for once and hold something solid close to their chest even if they had to build it with their bare hands brick by brick?
He wanted that.
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Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 9:51 am
He sat on what he could only assume had been a tire ised as a planter. For whatever reason, imaging cars might have sped about Deus was too bizaree despite Deus being strange on it's own. He shoved the umbrella in a crack of the tire and took slow, deep breathes to seep out the building anxiety he had on picking a place and deciding to build upon it.
Saliva assured him he wasn't alone, but a year without her proved her wrong. The weight of her had enough time to be strange again much like walking through the labs and resuming work as if nothing had happened when he knew despite all evidence that it had. And while she was here, the others had gone. The ones that stayed with him on those shores. The ones that whispered and crawled unknown. The ones that came at night day after day to talk while the cove took and took.
And no one else but him. No one else had heard them come at night in his dreams and all the while the cove ate.
Looking down he rubbed his hands, the fingers rubbing his gloves before he peeled them off to look at his palms. He slowly touched the carved wing at his shoulder and yet it wasn't just a full wing. A parasitic bird that could fly. One wing to fly in circles.
A confused carrier of things.
His eyes looked up but unlike the island there were no birds here. Nothing flew here. Deep things crawled around the rubble and oceans stirred. Somewhere a cove was hungry and he would sleep tonight to the sound of them again.
MoonKitsune
Romantic Exhibitionist
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MoonKitsune
Romantic Exhibitionist
Offline
Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 5:34 am
The wet stones clacked under his shoes as he walked, the dark walls glistening with water through the narrow cracked of moonlight and the cawing of seagulls. Waves. Waves. In and out in the distant like a dull hum, and went down the slope as he listened. Up above he could hear the creaking of boards and the cry of children calling out to get help, and as he looked up, the ceiling was composed of aged floorboards with one large gap from where he came through. The moon gaped wide above through a network of cobwebs and dust floated down to make a thick layer over his body.
The cove whispered and the dust collected like slow rolling fog about the ground, and as he walked away from the light to the kids calling to bring someone bigger and stronger, he moved.
The whispering grew stronger now, and he knew he was supposed to be here at long last, and as he walked the centipedes moved past, rising up like bubbles of oil from the wet stone to then start walking past - a few at first then more and more that it became hard to tell what he was walking on any longer.
Things got dark, but he felt the centipedes pressing against his ankles, then calves, and then knees, their bodies scraping and legs clacking louder and louder and louder until -
- the stone walls lit up, intricate blue swirls that twisted and turned about wet pitch slate upon which a row of shelves were open. The bodies were blue, cold, and small fish and crabs overturned and out of water flopped in desperation beside them on the slabs. Jordan. Rep. Al. Dawson. Ever. The people of the island had come here. In the center was Rin, sand pouring out of her eyes and mouth and down onto the ground without stopping. Moving over, he looked upon her and couldn't help but touch her and feel how warm she was, like resting in the sun,
A metal creak and he turned about, a shelve opening up with a bare slap coated in insects. Vacant - until now. Until the cove had made a decision.
"I said blood."
His eyes shot wide at the woman behind him - he one from that night - with a wooden fishing spear at his throat. It shot into his neck and he staggered, grasping at it and hitting the open shelf as he pulled on the spear only to see it morph and transform into a bubbling red centipde from his neck, and from it's back a dripping wing. Panic shot through him as he pulled it out, but as he did, he felt all of him come out with it, muscle and sinew, ribcage and organ, all pulling out at the end of it as it spilled out onto the ground.
Suddenly each body shook on the slap as their bodies glowed blue and the phones rang inside them, chiming over and over and the girl from before was gone and the waves crashed in as the water rose deep around him while everything was drowned out by shrieking ringtones before -
Melvin gasped as he sat up, staring out into the dark. All the covers were off, and his shirt clung to his chest as he gasped for air. It was quiet. His laptop glowed blue as it slept. A hand blindly reached out to the spot beside him to wake them up, but his fingers only found the end of the bed, and he stared down to nothing.It was quiet for an hour before he laid back down. It was quiet for a hour as he laid there. It was quiet till morning.
