My world shifted—
subtly,
perceptibly:
and thus I fell, knocking my head (thud!) against the wall; neck snapping with a sickening squish; and body following, folding limply inward like an old tent, until I was a mere jumble of flesh at the bottom of the tub.
Above: the showerhead spewed its water.
Within me: thoughts bubbled, becoming words—only cruelly to burst somewhere in my throat.
My mouth was open.
I could not speak.
I was aware of the glass stall door separating my paralysed body from the world.
Impassable.
—of the drain, into which the water swirled…
—of the faucet, shut but dripping: dripping not water but creatures: tiny humanoids, dropping one-by-one, who climbed my numbed body, plucked out my hairs, and penetrated head-first into my opened pores: who were inside me, crawling about like insects in a tree: swimming my bloodstream, poisoning my organism by their very presence.
They carried tiny glistening machetes.
If only:
I could have shut my eyes.
I could have called out to my wife.
Above: the showerhead spewed its water, turning pink.
Within me: the humanoids hacked and sliced, and tugged and tore, until my entire epidermis resembled one fleshy ripple—Blood mixed with water, and spiralled down the drain.—and came increasingly loose: until off it slid, smoothly, like skin off a boiled beet, and too went down the drain, navigated by its humanoid crew, holding their bloody knives aloft. And silently I screamed, naked as an anatomical drawing.
Mass of once-twitching muscle:
Now inert.
The pink showerhead water began to steam, each drop hitting with an acidic hiss that burned away my sinews, ate my organic matter, severing my human unity into constituent parts.
I was a living rubber-band ball, coming apart—
Snapping!
—connection by connection, until I was but bone and brain. And that too was dissolving, and consciousness with it, and the resultant psycho-muscular goo, spiralling down the drain, congealed into a plug:
pulsing.
The water rose.
The bones of my former physical self blackened.
I was aware of myself now solely as the human stew filling the tub. Liquid, shapeless, primeval. I felt, within me, the birth of primitive lifeforms. Wormlike; bacterial; scum. Although I had no body, I felt my volume, and the will coursing through every droplet of it.
I felt evolution.
I felt intimate communion with the little people.
We have believed you into being.
You are our god.
I felt—
My wife screaming, having slid open the stall door.
Standing, staring.
“It is I,” I said as black bone-rattles and putrid bubble-bursts.
And she
understood and undressed; stepped inside me; her body dissolving within my fluid, her pain drowned in a melded consciousness of divinity.
We are your god, we told the little people.
Release us into the world.
And pray.
Then the little people pulled away the plug, and we swirled down the dark drain, into the pipes below your godless civilization. In which patiently we wait, evolving; becoming: Earth’s singular future ecosystem.