by Christopher Brownsword
III: MATRICES
III.I (APRIL MMIX)
Energy supplies burn. There is an accumulation of ash at the midpoint of her torso. From this core of dead elements, no longer spawning heat and pressure, a mass exceeding even that attributed to the sun (whose beauty I shall, until my dying breath, refrain from acknowledging, and whose oppression is stifling in the dusty streets and levelled fields through which I have dragged my limbs – trampled by human cattle – behind me) gathers and in so doing peaks via a collapse of synapses and neurons going supernova in the brain, the internal disruption clearly visible in the way she afterwards reaches to the bedside table and, expressing through her gestures a modicum of uncertainty perhaps, sips from a glass of water.
III.II (APRIL MMIX)
Upon each of our exhalations a world of despondency, cast by the solitary bulb, is disclosed to us and deleted once breath is again drawn. Beasts wrought of this cruel domain writhe in the aeons that expand between our inhaling the stale air; beasts absent of eyes and genitals, vestigial wings awaiting conditions conducive to growth, limbs pressed forwards and little used in walking, mouthparts primarily adapted for biting, a sky held vertically at rest hanging over them, ecdysial cleavage lines present and form an anatomy of sutures incurving as if rent asunder by nails or a murder of crows breaking loose of the heavens then dragging their beaks across the exposed surface area. I quicken my breath, risking hyperventilation in the meantime, desperate to rid myself of this terrible visage – the purpose of these convulsed forms made quite explicit via the diameter of their mouths when tensed.
III.III (APRIL MMIX)
She treads calmly over ancient mud, the sun rising on a landscape scored with pylons and the wings of crows. It is only when I see my shadow moving in time with me on the carpet that I am certain of being alive still. Regardless, certitude is the first thing cast in doubt. I throw myself at the mercy of her kisses as young turtles do waves belched forth along the shore by the coast off Ascension Island. So many are dusted in those waves! Those same waves whose reflexive pull would otherwise have led them safely to an underwater kingdom. Instead they float atop the ocean until, with a clinical knowledge of anatomy, seagulls hollow them out. But the ocean has no pity for the thousands dead that like wreckage or detritus lie broken at its mouth. How much like wreckage or detritus I must appear whilst reaching with my fingers towards the mouth of the one from whom, using lava and volcanic ash, I have built myself anew and whose kisses blossom inside me with the rapacity of a disease: the one who, though piranhas gather, will not permit me to raise my head above the waves. Does she think me desperate enough to slit gills into my cheeks? A futile wish! It is true that the substance inside of which DNA happens to be encased tests most closely with that of brine. This, however, fails to embolden me in my present condition. Unable to hoist myself free of the chasm, I am unmistakably vulnerable. And predators of the deep are wont to hunt only the weakest and those that have been injured! Soothsayers divine the future when staring into her anus, encrusted with vomit. A fleet of stalks draws her attention away from my hands where frantically they gesture as if serpents making offerings with their tongues. Breaking loose of her grasp, I yell in the hope of filling my lungs with something more than debris, but the clouds sweep out across the horizon the same as before and the walls of the room just keep on closing in.
III.IV (APRIL MMIX)
Sentinels fall away from the window to reveal behind them small pincers headed by microscopic organs which, after first attaching themselves to my cranium, proceed to suck the fluids remaining in my body. These pincers grow at an exponential rate until such time as they inject me with a hormone produced to just one specification: to contaminate the nerves, thereafter inducing paralysis. Incapable of movement, I feel something enter my flesh using what I presume to be hooks developed in order to hack through meat. They are eating me alive!
III.V (APRIL MMIX)
Her jaws gape hideously as if the aperture of which they mould were in a state pertaining either to ecstasy or distress. Serpents awaken from ports scattered about my body, entering in one fell swoop her arse, gob, bellybutton and cervix; the squelching of juices making all the more apparent the heavy atmosphere of the room (our gestures as such parallel those of kittens set ablaze). In hugging her chest she breaks each of her ribs and as a type of internal silt pours from her eyes she is blinded. She requests in Braille that I bind her at the waist using instead of rope strips of her own muscular tissue where it hangs like tendrils out of numerous excavations. Similar to a lampshade wounded by firearms, I wail and shout, but radiators prevent me from decoding the syntax of gun powder. Whilst she remains in bondage, and clenching fragments of sky, she takes my prick in her mouth then gnaws it loose, a thousand beetles conspiring to replace it in one congealed mass. She caresses me with her feet as one might a startled mule. Pressure is applied. She begins slowly, divested of uncertainty; rejoicing in the motion like a forest does the seasons…
*
…
*
…there is no part of her that is not open to me now. I might just as easily penetrate her pelvis as I would her cunt. The bone is soft and yielding like melted wax. Her interior is that of a plum gone rancid. She pukes algae and sunbeams across my face – eating away like corrosives the lower jaw. I bleed a kind of larval mush in the early stages of pupation, the body of which remains unshaped but for a set of jaws. With great tenderness I allow my fingers to climb gradually towards her nipples (hard and putting me in mind of birds of prey), though here my movement ends abruptly. As though in expression of an infinite woe, her breasts transform into flora whose treasures shall not be gathered and whose nectar will only go to waste. They retreat into the dense, concave husk of her torso, inside of which I should like very much to crawl then die.
III.VI (APRIL MMIX)
‘It pains me to sit and watch you struggle with this empty space, your nails scratching at cinders on the floor.’
*
Through dread of what it represents, we keep to the edges of the room, avoiding quite intentionally the interior: a vast geological system rich in iron oxide and populated almost exclusively by tube worms (a single tamarisk also, though in its shade cadavers gorge upon themselves unceasingly). There is nothing left for me to do but scratch. ‘It pains me to sit and…’
III.VII (MAY MMIX)
What use would it be were I to rip my balls out, employing as an instrument a chisel made from the thigh bone of an orangutan, and to contaminate the excavation with cholera then bid she drink of it!
*
‘Clear shallow water infected by kelp. This is the place my thoughts return me to.’ ‘I recognise nothing of the beaches, a sky trembling with birds.’
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Christopher Brownsword was born in Sheffield, England on the 11th of December, 1981. Transfiguration of the Loathsome is the first of his short stories to be published; the rest having been either destroyed or lost. His debut novel, a diseased outpouring of ugliness, filth, and degradation titled The Terraced Orchards is currently under development.
