He placed his hands on either side of his head and tried to breathe.
Was he dead yet? Had he finally willed himself to nothingness? But he could still hear the music....the hurtful, angry music that he listened to because
he
felt hurtful, angry, and oh-so-destructive. Could one hear when one was dead, could one press fingers that glistened white like cancer into the wild tangles of twisted and spiked and gelled hair?
He heard a sandpapery rattle, and realized that it was his lungs fluttering, watched beyond the peak of his chin as his thin, spidery chest crept its way upwards before sinking, defeated, to rest again.
He breathed. He lived.
Disappointed, he closed his eyes, and tried not to cry.
Naked, cold, he rolled the papery husk of his worm-white body to the side and pulled a blanket over his head, and imagined that he was cocooned within the warm, membranous sac of a womb, and that when he emerged, he would be transformed. Not-quite-dead, instead of the hovering, tired not-quite-alive that he was now. Sooner or later it would come. Sooner or later it would take him.
It was the memories that took him now, however. Memories of designs carved in his skin by unseen hands, pictures that he painted without ever lifting a finger or a blade, spells written upon the writhing parchment of his own body. He walked down a path of milky white semen stretching into the moon like a rippling wet ribbon, and tilted his head back, stroking his vulnerable naked throat with his blunt, ragged nails and wishing that they would not break when he sharpened them. He looked up to the moon with his red, red eyes, through the sheaf of his red, red hair, and called it Father. It was the only father he knew, for his demented, fearful mother with her withered sacks of breasts would not tell him from what loins sprang the seed that created him.
A droplet of pearly moisture splashed from his footsteps to his lips, and he licked its saltiness away and remembered twelve. Twelve, and not much smaller than he was now, perhaps not quite as thin with the layer of childish softness that had melted away by now at the ripe old age of fourteen. He remembered sweat, and the smell of engine oil, and a massive, heavy, laboring body, hard and coarse with man-hair, remembered grunting, remembered the corners of his mouth stretching, cracking and bleeding. He remembered his mother finding the man in the house and, despite her tiny, wispy mass, browbeating him in the name of the absolution of sin until the man cursed and fled, leaving the boy a bruised, sticky, satisfied mess with a new flavor in his mouth and a new taste for pain. Since that night the boy had abandoned the name that she had burdened him with, and called himself Sin.
The river of man-essence vanished, washed away by a veined tide of red birth effluvium, and he sank into it, drifting further downwards into his memory-dreamings and tasting the hot, meaty saltiness of it filling his lungs. He drowned and died in that blissful darkness, swathed in the warmth of some mother's dying, a phantom imagination of her broken-glass scream singing him to sleep.
For a short, short while, he truly slept, his mind drifting in some soft, cloudy ether, as innocent and guileless as that of the child that he should have been but never was, not even in the moment that he clawed his way free from his mother's birth canal. Perhaps the screams that had lulled him into somnolence had been a memory of hers.
He did not dream. That much was a blessing.
When he awoke he was damp and even more chilled, his gaunt cheek pressed against cool earth rather than the sheets of his bed and the detritus of the forest floor tangled in the bloody color of hair that floated in a wild cloud of tangles about his head, like thorned and spiked brambles; one frail, skeletal hand was threaded through the wispy down of pubic hair so soft that it could only belong to a sweetly untouched boy. He stroked it for a moment, savoring the silky texture, and then sat up, brushing the dirt from his clammy skin. For a moment he was dizzy, disoriented, and then he saw the sleep-runes crafted upon his naked arms, scratched there by his slumbering mind for the purpose of carrying his limp and unresisting form from his bedroom. He frowned at them, and then raked his nails across the lines of sigils, breaking their seals and their magic with the fresh rents in his flesh.
Blood ran down his arms like dozens of tiny rivers, making new paintings from the old, and he smiled.
The moon was high overhead, as full and ripe as a grape, so swollen that it looked as though it might burst its soft skin and spill the pus and juice of its innards across the sky. He did not know exactly where he was, but the scent of the autumnal North Dakota forest around him was familiar, and he flared his nostrils, testing for the familiar scents of home, of the sickly-sweet smell of the incense that his mother burned at her altar and that seemed to cling to the trees for miles around, for the baby-powder smell of her shriveled raisin body. It was there, somewhere to the west, subtly underlacing the heady miasma of loam and rain and decaying leaves, of animal musk and rotting bones and patches of ravaged fur--not as strong as he was accustomed to, which meant that he could be five or fifty miles from the brownstone house with its candles and statues of Christ. At least he had his bearings, for whenever he decided to return home.
If he decided to return home.
His bare feet rustled softly on the forest floor for a few steps, and then he slipped into a fluid crouch, his naked white body prowling soundlessly through the trees, flitting amidst the brush like a little ghost cat, flickering in the darkness like a snowy candle pillar topped with a bright ruby flame. That flame burned in his eyes as well, lighting them, making them wild and hungry and predatory, and he could have laughed as he breathed in the cold, spicy flavor of the air. He was a beast of the forest now, a creeping maggot-white thing of strange humours whose veins ran with something other than blood, and he imagined that his teeth were pointed, filed down to delicate razor edges as he had so longed to do but feared to. For the piercing in his left ear he had been chained to the altar for a week, left without food while his mother prayed over him, exhorted the demons to leave him while he silently begged them to take him, take him home. The pain of the candle wax on his pallid, delicately veined skin had been exquisite; the gnawing ache in his stomach and the droning wail of her voice had not.
