I didn’t want to be cleansed. Things were fine as they were. I could feel death inside me, smooth as an egg. I knew what it was. In the Gospels Christ says, if a man is rid of one demon, he’ll just end up with seven more. I didn’t need seven. I only needed one.
Everything looks different with a ghost inside you. Even the air and the light. Nothing weighed anything. It all swayed at the slightest provocation. Every tree was seaweed. I moved slowly, because I no longer belonged where I was. Not where I was going, not where I came from. Not that you are trying terribly hard, but I don’t think you could understand. You have only lived with the living, only breathed air. There is so much more of death. There’s a gap in you. Just the right size for an egg.
You, though. You’ll never find one.
I know what you want. You want me to tell you how it happened, in the hope that, by accident, I’ll tell you something else along the way. I got lost in a cave. Not many people like caves, I’ll admit. They can’t imagine that it’s of interest to go crawling along in the dark. When you come out of a cave, when I come out of a cave, what you feel is relief and loss all at once. Here you are, where the sun is and where you can breathe, and behind you is what you have lost, the kingdom of the dark. You cannot even understand this much so I don’t know why you think you’ll understand anything else.
So I got lost. I knew I was going to die. I came to rest in the dark where nobody would ever find me. In fact I was at peace with this outcome. Not that I’d gone into caves seeking death but that it was how I wanted to die when it came to it. And that was when it spoke to me.
I can show you a way out, it said.
Not in words and not in sounds. But that was what it said. At first I just thought that this was what my own dying brain was saying to me. Then it came again—
I can show you a way out.
“For what price?” I asked. I did ask that in words. At the time, I didn’t know another way.
You have to take me with you, said the darkness. I have been here for such a long time.
“How?” I asked.
Tilt your head back and open your mouth, said the darknesss. Breathe deep.
So I did.
In the first few moments it was disgusting. My mouth tasted of ashes. I could feel something pouring into me, as if I were being choked by it. It went down, down into me, until it began to pool at that place in my guts where I used to feel hollow. All my life, I’d had this gnawing down in my stomach. Now it was silent. I was sated and I wanted nothing. It kept flowing in. I had become a complete person, filled up at last. When it had all come inside me, I realized I had closed my eyes.
And when I opened them, I could see.
That’s what you’re here for, right? What I saw.
Well, you know what I saw. It was a tomb. The walls had been decorated with pigments and with tools that do not exist. There were inscriptions nobody could decipher in a language nobody knew. There was a body that was not human. And what you want to know is what it all meant. What the writing said. Who it was. What it was. That’s what everybody wants to know. You come here and you ask. You called me crazy and shut me up here. You didn’t believe in my ghost at first and then when you did you took it out of me. But it won’t live in one of you. It chose me. I wasn’t the first person to die in that cave. It chose me.
I went home and I killed my husband and the children and the dog and I wrote more in that language in their blood. I didn’t need that family anymore. Truthfully I did not want to kill the dog, but when I arrived home it knew I had changed. I had become a complete person. I finally understood that humans are only ever half a person. The dog saw it right away. It would have killed me, so it had to die. And then I think maybe we’ve been cruel to dogs. We’ve made them too much like us. They feel like they’re only half, too. So maybe it was right that it died. It was wrong to have the children. More half people. I fix my mistakes. They won’t have to suffer.
You want to know what it all means. If you could understand the answer, you wouldn’t ask the question. You can only see half of anything. The other half is so lost to you, you can’t even tell something was ever meant to be there. You could never hold yourself, complete, within you. You’ll always try to build the missing parts of you by going outward. You could never wait thousands of years in the dark for the right chance. I must have known that even before I met my ghost. I’ll tell you and tell you and you’ll never understand, because you are only half and you understand nothing.
Yes, I killed them. I’d kill you, too, if I could. Nobody should live this way, as only half. You’ve condemned me to it because you don’t know what it is. I see you all limping grotesquely on this world’s surface and you don’t even know what you are. You can’t even hear yourself screaming. But I can hear you. Even if I dug my thumbs into my ears until they reached my brain, I’d never stop hearing you scream.
this one was really hot, loved it