They Live

In another world, the icy blackness hurts; it's pounding at my skull frantically, begging for response, and I laugh and laugh and the peals of laughter rebound off the edges of the world, filling my brain with disturbed cackling. The laughter catches in my throat, curling inwards before exploding out of my mouth in a maniacal bark, and I laugh.

I am not the villain.

I am not #0136.

I told them, stop, stop -- and all the world looked on while a young boy tried so desperately to plug all the holes in his mind, fill the cracks before his sanity left him completely, all while trying to save the rest of the globe but they refused. And what I want I get because I don't want to want, I want what I need and damn it I will not stop until I get every last thing I need, every last thing they need.

When I had my head shoved through the blender, when I had my sanity all but ripped from me, I came out on the other side crazy-glued together, pieces shoved into improper locations, holes gaping like mouths, ready to ensnare me and return me to that horror. The chasms yawn unendingly under foot, myself saved only by a thin sheet of glass, and It mocks me as I stare at It, just waiting for the moment when that glass crumbles to dust, like every other pathetic attempt at resistance has.

And It runs like mud through my veins...

When I returned, battered and broken, no one looked at me and saw the child I was, the scared, pitiful child I was, the one that sobbed into my elbow and hid my flaking facade from an apathetic world, the one that disappeared into the dripping voids left in my psyche. They watched me tumble in and out of those pitfalls after I returned from that hell-hole and then they shoved me back in, just to see what would happen.

I was seventeen.

They stared down at the child they broke -- left the boy's corpse lying there, decaying there -- and dared to be surprised when a monster rose from the rot, when something that shouldn't have been came from the depths of something that shouldn't have happened.

A tragedy viewed only through the cold, unfeeling lens of a man blinded by his doctorate, his capacity for empathy systematically removed through years of staring at a lab rat as it squirmed under the knife, and the mind decomposes, ebbing and waning, dying off, poisoned black by unthinking men and women who didn't care, who just wanted the answers to plug into their little equations.

So when I crawled out, on my hands and knees like a filthy dog, shivering and shuddering because of the invasive prodding, the innate wrongness of everything They did to me, and shouted No, no NO to everyone who would listen, I did not snap.

Not like a frayed rope, not like a piece of cheap plastic forced to bend against its build, not like a china doll smashing to the ground -- I did not snap then.

I snapped when, bound and gagged, screaming and bleeding, squirming and begging, sobbing and howling, I understood the world with horrifying clarity and accuracy.

The edges of the world, seemingly clear prior to my epiphany, had shocked me with such startlingly crisp lines. The disparity between what I'd taken for lucidity and what was truly had broken me and tossed me into the void of my soul, where that monster they planted in me had Its fill of fear, where Its tendrils flow through my flesh like vines shoving through a body -- my goddamn body -- pushing aside flesh and organs uncaring in its search for room.

AND I SAID NO MORE TO THE WORLD.

I'd reached for higher places after that, clawing my way with long, jagged, shivering fingers and untrimmed nails, weighed down by a trembling mortal coil that was no longer mine. The edges of the world, razor sharp knives, fell down around me -- I sliced myself on their points, skin breaking and blood flowing, and answers floated to the surface of my wounded flesh. The tips of the roots of their beast protruded into the open air, crawling out of me, eager for oxygen, and

I CULLED TRUTH FROM IT, I BROUGHT TRUTH FORTH IN THIS OTHER WORLD.

I am not the villain.

I am not #0136.

When I said, Stop it, no more, no more, never again -- they said that's nice son, now go play in your room and leave the thinking to us.

But no one looks Harlan fucking Worthe in the goddamn eyes and tells him to step back because screw you, thank you very much, you can't save children, I'll save children, you refuse to save children -- you sit back and watch gleefully as children break and sob and cry and are consumed by that beast you plant inside them and you take your notes.

I stand, the world spinning wildly -- you, maggots, twisting and writhing wildly.

I am not god, you acted as god, see how that got you, squirming, pinned down by mountains of fear -- rather I am the one holding your life in my hands.

And such insignificant dots you are, pinpricks against my soul.

All I need to do, all there is left, is to destroy you, all you monsters, and I will, because even as you whimper, please, god, please, please --

I am not God

-- and your voice, pounding at my skull frantically, begs for response, and my only response for you is DON'T SQUIRM, cruel, unending taunts because your torture should be unending but I am not Unending and so you must end.

I close my fist around the pitiful sparks of You and the beast's tendrils go cold inside me, withering up -- and the whole world flickers to darkness, marked only by the fires of my laughter.

In another world, a broken man laughs once -- and he does not stop.