Sirens Follow

He doesn’t want to fight them, the toothpick monsters in his closet. Their voices roller coaster through his veins but he knows the echoes won’t come out. They’ll stay cavernous inside, ricocheting like antique pistols. While all he wants is quiet, the type of quiet that comes with sleep and night and hot baths and softly falling rain.

He paces roughly around the world while deep dungeons call up to him. He tries not to listen. He doesn’t think that dungeons seem like a very sensible thing to listen to. But undersized monsters with oversized swords are attacking his insides, so you can’t blame a Pajama-clad warrior for thinking a damp-dark-hideaway would be the perfect place to find that hushhh.

He’ll fight because we told him to, not him directly, just all the little hims that struck a chord. We tell the hims that the world is in it for them; only he knows that the world is precisely the entity they’re trying to core. Like an apple. Get all the ugly out of it. Hoping you don’t ruin the whole damn thing.

So he dips his corer around black holes that he hopes are his world. In the end he pulls up all sorts of garbage, like the fisherman whose big catch turns out to be a boot. But these nets come up with nothing. All that work and not even a good story.

We tell him to hold on. But he doesn’t see anything to hold onto. Nothing to grip as the winds of the world whirlpool him with a vengeance. Unsympathetic apologies flicker out as dissapointment dominates the clouds. He cries but the resonation is swallowed by the sky. Gulped into the heavens. Mixed into the air.

So he runs. Hard. The way you run in dreams… being chased by the monsters. Only the monsters cling to his back and the harder he runs the louder they roar.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Nightmares were supposed to be just for sleeping. But somewhere along the way his mind got tripped up, and he could never regain his balance. So he runs to the end of the world. Hoping the demons will fall off the end of the ocean.

They don’t. So he stops running. Stops still in his footprints. He holds his breath and he dives into the pavement. The monsters rush away.

Sirens follow. Silence shatters, for all, except for him. And all the people with rivers on their cheeks ask, “why?” “how could he?”

But he doesn’t hear them. He takes solace in the silence. For the heavens have enveloped him and all is quiet.

Note: I got a prompt to explain something in different terms. I thought it would be interesting to write a children’s story about a suicide. Not for any practical purposes. But kind of a twisted perspective. I think it worked out well enough.

~ by carik on May 14, 2008.