You I awaken in a cave.
No light.
No memory.
Only the flicker of an instinct: get out.
You construct a geography of the chamber by trial and error—bumping into, remembering, the rocks; walls, floor and recesses, carved by liquid (you hear sometimes a trickle or an echoing drip-drip-drip) or by human hands.
Black canvas slowly acquiring characteristics, structure…
Your fingers, sliding across the wall, feel their way to a roughly-hewn opening.
You enter—attempt to enter—repulsed by the force originating within, from a faintly glowing grey, throbbing and gelatinous matter.
As it throbs, it secretes.
The secretions ooze from the opening, past your bare feet, into the main chamber.
They too glow faintly: bathing the entire interior in eeriness.
Following the secreted stream, you advance.
A kneeling figure—
Drinking from the stream.
He looks:
A skeleton thinly woven-over by flesh, as if a man unfinished. His jaw hangs loosely. The secretions he laps up pour out his porous existence.
“Tell a sad tale,” he rattles.
Then collapses into the stream, which begins to deconstruct him, taking him deeper into the murk.
You say the saddest tale you know, about you awaking in a cave, and when you arrive at the present moment, there is a rush; the stream becomes a river—
taking you:
through corridors of bone:
rushing toward a circle of approaching light:
—into:
Falling, flailing,
down a waterfall and—
Gunk.
Face-down and suffocating in it.
It slides down your throat like a putrid tongue, like bitter-fingered fists.
Digging, you claw out.
Breathing—
Gasping you see:
A landscape, endless, dark and unctuous, a black and pungent oozeland. Swamplike. Dead.
Behind you: a giant skull towers over the landscape.
From one of its two eye sockets you fell.
Vacant eyes.
You take suctioned steps forward through the grim muck.
The eyes spark into life. Two orbs afire, illuminating liquid torrents gushing from the skull’s sockets and other orifices.
The horizon is not a line but a waveform.
A noise as if the grinding of gears and ringing of an infinity of distant bells—
Pulsing
Words scrawl themselves upon the entirety of the sky as if carved into a scroll of flesh:
“Tell yourself to me.”
Pulsing
The skull begins moving toward you.
Chasing you.
An ossified dreadnought upon a sea of viscous ink, seeking with roving, fire-eye searchlights.
“Tell yourself to me—”
the sky says.
Running, you change direction; and again, passing dried, jagged trees composed of unfinished sentences, peeling off as bark. Word-leaves cling to branches. Skeletal arms jut out of the ooze. Flattened faces float past on the boggy surface, eyes popping into noxious gas, carrying in them the rottenness of the unthought.
You’ll never outrun the skull.
You—
Thinking:
Yourself forgetting, that’s the way: not outrunning but diving into the human soup, deeper and deeper, because there is no bottom in a graveyard of ideas.
Don’t breathe.
Don’t be.
I stop. Fire-eyes extinguished. I had an idea—but, somehow, it’s gotten away from me.