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God and man are undead
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The dozens howl like the death of decades in an abandoned century.
Forked torture tongue licks and broken ankle avulsion holler rotting screams of perfidious abandonment. The proclamations rattle like rope chains made of old Lucifer’s pubic hair, tethering the earth and guiding every abrade and stoop and reach and clench. It’s like knowing the feeling, that maybe God’s at His work, playing with all creationisms clay in a childish, jealous rage. Hordes and sole feast upon themselves and others and follow what anthropophagia senses remain to heed. They chase scrawny city animals that run for dear life; people and pets and nightlife and wildlife; morsels of mankind and other kinds. The end of this place is a steep steel wilderness, growing out of each dying, sallow recollection. Malediction rains down upon everything like the slithering, saturating bits of a melting, micro plastic sky. Ashen and sulphurous and bitter upon every disintegrating, adumbrate face.
It’s gray daylight in an alley of stringy, sinew tendrils. Yellowing sausage intestine collagen. Sloshing pink slime carnage concrete. Sanguine drench.
What might’ve been women and men and children eat each other and everything else, until the inevitable; that the bodies are almost genderless and indistinguishable. Almost. Many are such and soon, all will follow.
Little kiss-less blonde girls feast upon cousins like cotton candy cattle.
What might’ve been a woman stands, touching her chew mark craters, which were once dangling breasts. Another is in the act of tearing her utters off. Maybe the pain is like a serotonin. She feasts and squats and shits fleshy descensus. Her mouth gurgles and moans and feasts over and over.
Crimson, lipless faces of rotting and feeding also crouch and shit extremities. They rip their own anuses apart, birthing eyeballs and fingers and whole hands. They grasp greedily to eat each bit of flesh and bone, again and again, until the body parts stop dropping out somehow, like a prolapsing, tangling knot. Maybe muscle and gravity eventually decease within.
Two are eating each other’s faces like they’re making out, feeling each other. Gutting bellies and genitals and rectums like their fucking. Moaning declension and exploding varicose. Lovers.
One something like a man in a russet stain, blue short sleeve office shirt, squats and shits chunks of a foot below himself. He quickly grasps a black painted, big toe and shoves it back into his lipless mouth. What might’ve been an office man swallows immediately and burp growls. He instantly tries to stick his hand back up his own ass, digging deep so he can eat the stub again. He moans. He snarls. Impatient. He unplugs his moist fist and tears open his shirt and gouges into his own belly. What might’ve been searches his exposure of innards for the same chunk of toe.
Two others blindly sniff and find the man displaying his own intestines. They begin the ranting, crunching strain of helping him tear the rest of his belly open. The two ladder skin and muscle from bone. Bone from socket. They wrench his arms off in the process of finding the belly toe.
Others, that have ears to listen, come and eat of the body of what might’ve been an office man, as if he were the representation of Jesus at their holy communion; a church made of flaying skin and congealing blood and pews built of bone marrow and offal leavings. The holy sacrifice of meat.
He pops and pulps under the trample of dozens. His brain slips from his skull at the hammering of knees and fists and pressing pressure.
What might’ve been a boy child swiftly crawls and breaths up and swallows the brain. The boy child chunkily chews the medulla oblongata and licks his lipless teeth with half a tongue.
Elsewhere, one drags a body by a strangling fist of guts. It mumbles toward a large sloping, red metal garbage bin. Both lids are vertically open. What might’ve been crashes into the side and falls over and flips, by its chest, balancing on the edge of the bin. What might’ve been tips itself head first, eunuch naked except for shiny black dress boots, upending in the air. It crashes upon garbage, pulling the sanguine slosh of small intestine like a tightening rope. It heaves its dinner, belly first, to the ledge of the bin. A big pull and the motionless other teeters and falls, head first. Its broken feet clang the metal edge and violently vibrate the bin enough for the double lid to slam down, causing a ruckus echo that’s answered by a mass of gurgling hysterics. Such a vibration receives the perilously unrecognizable, transgressive languages of what might’ve been.
The hollers and slush of screams eventually return to mumbles and the sundry sounds of feeding.
One that might’ve been a man manages to witness with its eyes and moves its wine dark ovals left and right, glaringly. He avoids the centre of the horde. Stumbles and stops along the periphery. Whiffs with what’s left of his nose and senses the world. What might’ve been a man catches a lone molecule that his scent receptors can’t understand. He turns from the others, shuffling slowly away and out of the alley. His wreck of flesh stumbles into the dingy, ransack city street.
Rows of abandoned cars remain beside parking meters, paralleling the one way road of black, gray asphalt and white lines of traffic design. A broken skeleton lays under a Buick and hollowly smiles at the alley.
What might’ve been a man lifts his chin and smells again. Watches soundlessly. Something close has a scent different from its own. Different from the others. Movement. What’s coming moves toward what might’ve been a man. Faster than any of the others. Comparatively whole in its approach. Closer. Until it comes upon what might’ve been a man and moves around in one stride. It’s running. He remembers running.
The runner continues through the street and beyond the alley. What might’ve been a man’s eyes and nose beckon of a belly filling with hunger. An unending appetite. The remains of his mouth shrills and groans. Burps tersely. He screams like visceral gushers of blood in the direction of what’s running down the middle of the street.
Those that have ears slouch from the alley and follow the screamer who fiddles his vocal pied piping.
A raven at the top of a traffic light caws. Listeners listen and forget about the other chasing something. Another raven caws from the ledge of a building. The avian dinosaurs communicate in individual numbers and pitches, back and forth, speaking to one another in their raven way. In the way they’ve evolved from their kind.
The listeners vacillate and don’t follow anything. They remain still and wait for another noise.
The previous, terse scream penetrates the hum of the city’s fading echo and they remember and follow what might’ve been a man once again. The ravens caw and the listeners stop yet again. The other one screams and again, they follow what might’ve been a man.
Cold silence continues the tasteless moment, slouching and hunching along. But the air tingles. Static. Too calm. Too quiet. Hairs stand. Something’s about to happen.
An massive explosion rumbles like the centre of the city is being penetrated by the girth of a phallus hurricane.
Waves of tremors scar the next moment as a distant fulmination shudders pressure through the streets and rattles all the buried bones beneath the earth.
Everyone who might’ve been a man or a woman or a child falters in their following way. They turn and stumble and fall. All needly in the general direction of the massive vibration. Dozens flood from the alley and move in the opposite direction of the screamer and the runner, chiseling a plague into the world with each drawn, simulacra breath.
A distant flash blinks in the distance. Those with watching eyes lose their vision permanently.
Another thunderous explosion causes the earthquake rumble of a collapsing structure. Debris and dust blow clouds of ash and dust into the street, covering each in a camouflage of gray powder.
A legion howl like the death of decades in an abandoned century.
What might’ve been are an army of statues waking from a Gorgon’s blink.
The sky rains scalding debris and melting shrapnel, burning their flesh. Charing their bones. What might’ve been don’t mind.
