1:00 AM

"It's been ever so long since I saw you. Where on earth have you been?"

Her rich full mouth stretched to accommodate a bright smile. A luxurious parting of glossy lips that were painted a brazen scarlet.
She stood in his way as he walked towards the coffee machine...though walking would be a tad overstatement to the discerning eye, for he just about dragged his feet well enough to mimic a half hearted walk.

Her hand was impishly outstretched to block his path and her question doused with a mischievous chuckle. She was childishly knitting her brows to sweetly rebuke him a little more when her words died into a gurgle on the tip of her tongue, and her hot wet smile mutated into a silent scream.

A few moments ago, she'd seen him walking towards her cubicle, knowing full well that he'd take  a detour and take the passage closest to her work area, that terminated at the end of the hall in a big coffee machine. He was such a lamb, always scared to even approach her, let alone talk or ask her out.

She'd watched him follow the same pattern for a few weeks, and had laughed at his artless pretense of drinking coffee, in between shooting swift glances towards her. She's laughed even harder when she'd caught him rubbernecking her, and he'd naively fumbled with his glasses, so that it looked like he wasn't really staring, just adjusting his spectacles..and there was nothing else needed to give him away.
She'd often strolled towards the coffee machine, smiling wickedly, licking her full red lips and watching his face grow redder in response.

"you're silly", she'd say and walk back.

These were memories from six months ago. He'd stopped coming to the coffee machine, until today. Though he followed the same pattern she thought, his endearing shy gait was replaced by a faltering trotter, and he didn't as much as recognize that smile he endured a dozen office coffee's for.
She'd decided to take matters in her own hands by blocking his path to learn more of his absence and immediately regretted it.
She had to squint her eyes to look at him. What had been a a handsome bespectacled face now resembled nothing like she remembered.

He looked like death wore a skin.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't know you were unwell. Is that why you stopped coming to work?"
She tried to sound normal, though she did lower her gaze. It was difficult to casually talk to that face. It had taken a ghastly pallid colouring of cold dead flesh drained of any life. His hair were clumps of greying strands and his spectacles did little to hide the broad dark rims of grey under his eyes. Grey, that was smeared with black in creases where the skin hanged like victorian curtains.
Everything about him had drooped.

She looked more closely and saw every bit of him had deteriorated. Like he was disintegrating and would fall into pieces any moment now. Everything about him looked neglected.

"What on earth is wrong with this man" she thought.
His shoes were dirty, his pants were creased and stained at pockets, his shirt looked two sizes too big for him, and his tie was at its unwashed best.
Stains everywhere.
She painfully scrutinized him and saw that he was sweating like he was sitting atop a furnace, even though the ac was set to arctic chill. His palms were sweating like a watering hole, and he kept wiping them to his pants, or hid them in his pockets.

"err, are you okay", she asked him. This time seriously concerned.

"yes I'm fine". he mouthed these words hurriedly and rushed past her.
She followed him, noticing him from the back. His lethargic demeanour paired with his anxiousness made him look all the more pitiful.

"You know you can talk to me. If you're sick I can help you. I work in HR."
her smile growing more sympathetic with each word.

"No, I'm fine. It's nothing"

"I don't think so. You've been gone for so long. Were you sick? when did you join back? let's talk at lunch time?"

He searched her eyes for mocking interest, and saw only genuine concern.

"I'm busy at lunch time"

"Please", she whispered exasperatedly, clutched his arm and disarmed his inhibitions with her ever so sweet a smile.

She waited for him at the cafeteria and left disappointed. She knew he wouldn't show up.

She met him again the next day, and pleaded with him to talk to her. He looked worse than before, and she couldn't help but wonder how a man so irreversibly broken could look even more damaged in a mere twenty four hours.

"Talk to me. I'll be waiting"

After two weeks of lunching with disappointment she saw a dilapidated form of sagging flesh walk towards her.

"Don't say a word, just listen" he said.

"Six month ago I was due for a promotion and had just about finished packing up to shift into a newer, bigger, better house. I'd met a nice girl..you know, you were way out of my league and I didn't stand a chance with you. You were my fantasy, and my reality was a quiet girl who'm I'd often bumped into my building. W'd started seeing each other and soon after I'd shifted to my new house.

The rent wasn't much and the view was great. For all its merits the building was largely unoccupied, probably because it was a new building. I was a happy man. Content and had nothing more to ask of life, and those were my last happiest days.
After a week of shifting in, I realized I couldn't sleep very well. It'd always grow too cold, and I'd wake up parched each night. There was always some noise, like someone knocking or climbing stairs or banging against a wall. It was a new building and work was happening around the clock. Some lifts in separate wings were still being installed, and that noise sometimes grew louder at night.
Most nights, I didn't know if I were asleep or awake and then one day that noise stopped. I thought this would be it, that I'd be able to sleep finally.. and I'd drank an extra beer to aid my sleeping.

I was such an idiot to have such high hopes. At exactly one that night, I woke up because I distinctly heard my door open, and I was too tired even though alarmed to wake up with a sudden start..I'd slowly opened my eyes, half guessing that it was the construction work in the building again, when I realized that someone was sitting on the floor, right beside my bed.
It was a woman and she was sobbing. She'd crossed her hands on her raised knees and buried her face in it. It wasn't a sob like I'm used to hearing. It was a continuous grunt, like five animals moaning in their death throes. It was horrible and echoed throughout my room. It was still pitch dark and I felt like I'd lose all control of my bodily functions. She just sat, her face buried between her knees and making those demonic noises. They couldn't have come from anything alive..those sobs sounded like everything dying, and my heart was ready to cave in. She was inches away from where I slept. What should I do? I couldn't think at that moment. Fear had paralyzed me, and I didn't even realize that I'd sweat enough to soak the sheets. I jumped out of the bed and tried to run, only..hahaha, that creature had a hold of my ankle. I looked back and she was slowly raising her face. That face wasn't even a face. It had no eyes, it had no nose, it had no lips. Just a thick vertical slit. She was naked, and menstruating on my carpet. Her head was sewn with a hellish darkness of hair, and that slit that looked like an incision stretched and spread all over her face.. until her face was nothing but a hole, and she let out an unholy cackle, like a string of helpless screams patched together to form a laughter.
She threw me back on the bed, and went back to burying her face between her knees, and started weeping. That maniacal noise again. I don't remember anymore from that night, because when I woke up, it was morning and I was alone and burning with fever. My ankle had dislocated and I had lost my mind.
I was not sure whether it was paranoia or just a nightmare, but I couldn't spend another night in my house.
Fear had gotten the better of me, and I dared not talk of it to anyone. That night I stayed at my girlfriend's house and did not have the strength in me to sleep, but I must have dozed off because at one that night I woke up..there were muffled noises coming from the kitchen.
I switched on the lights and walked into the kitchen, only to see my girlfriend stuffing her mouth full of broken pieces of glass and chewing on them. Her face was lacerated, there was blood everywhere, and she was chewing on glass. Her features were mangled. lips torn, half her tongue lay on the floor, blood streaming down her chin and her cheeks were punctured. The lower half of her face was maimed..mutilated. Shards of glass stuck out of her cheeks and nose and I spent that night in a hospital.

I got my message. It had to be me..all alone. In my room.

Each night at one she now walks in, sits down near my bed, and sobs. Makes those ungodly wailing sounds―a grim symphony of every abominable ungodly howl. Like a sickening lament of every obnoxious curse..like bawling victims on a torture table about to have their toes plucked out, have their skins pulled out, have their genitals branded with burning needles."

"umm, I have to go. I hope you feel better"

"have their eyes scraped with needle points, have their bones torn out with pincers..."

"have a good day" he said.

tenderness algebra sans theorems

Birthing from creases and folds of a pretentiously eclectic bed
made to look moody and morose only ironically
contrasting bedsheets like orbiting planets
who know nothing of what they are, yet still exist to orbit a star
momentary value of night bed languishing in a corner stiff with rigor mortis
reptilian slither to a heat spot left to disintegrate by the window
discover a map, mend a broken compass that leads to a path of smiles
shower in revulsions and dress in hope,
sewn together by atomic sutures of paranoia
clasped in spaces by anxiety and terror

harmless chirp of sparrows slayed by an angry squawk
demonic screech that shattered a heart
a sudden gust of animosity swilling
from abdomen where intestine have turned to clay
putrified aversion, no proton pump inhibitor could stop
the undernourished thread that secures our skin
is a cadaverous wire that never feeds

Downdates

If I were stuck on an island with only a sack of food, I would not ration well. I'd probably eat it all up the first week and then think of ways to keep myself from starving. Probably dive and catch fish or fashion a spear out of trees or something similarly idiotic, but man oh man I can't ration on good things. 

Case in point all the pending tv series that had collected into a huge heap of virtual gratification during those few weeks I was sunning myself down under. 

There were three episodes of 'The Expanse', three of 'American dad' and two of 'Family guy' and what did I do? 

I downloaded them all within the span of one hour and spent that one whole day watching them all back to back. 

 

No, I didn't think "let's save an episode each for later, until the next ones come out so you won't have a terribly long gap in between"..in fact I did think of that and dismissed it as a fairly silly rational. 

So I watched them all, and by the end of the day I was sitting empty handed, faced with the reality of actually doing some real work now that my excuses for being busy were all exhausted. Ugh!! 

So what did I do? I downloaded another anime I'd been meaning to watch called 'pet shop of horrors' and much to my delight it was not only awesome but fantastically freakin fabulous..and to my dismay it was only four episodes long—each episode not more then 20 minutes (sad face). So yeah that was over before I did dinner..now what? 

My brain feels famished now that I've so much free time on me. 

Strummed on my uke for hours, for a second I thought my neighbors were going to break in and beseech me to stop the music, but then I remembered I have no neighbors so rock on with the foetus guitar.  

In the past few weeks I've finished almost 4 books. I don't know how it came to be, but all the while I was lazing on the beach  or had any spare time be it between eating or traveling, I just read read and read some more. By the gods, I'm done with all the transmetropolitans ( and how much fun were they), a manga, an uber fat novella of horror stories and a book by Terry Pratchett. 

Imagine that, from having a dry reading spell to chomping through a big fat heap of books.

I've started on a new one too..and this one I found in a quaint little second hand store that was right next to my hotel in Sydney.

This one!!!

 Robotech was the first ever anime I watched, and I was but a child that time, and imagine my surprise when I found this. Apparently the author painstakingly incorporated material from the original manga scripts and RPG's to create these wonderful storylines. Being given additional characters details by comic company, these books were created under the Robotech franchise..and man did I jump with glee when I spotted this. So now it's mine, and it's just as much fun to leaf through its musty pages now, as it was watching it as a child. Of course the storyline is completely different, all this happening years after where the series ended..but still. 

The big book disappointment was the collection of horror stories. Man, the front cover was so dark and supposedly scary, but the stories were a fizzle. Just meh. I mean they had no scares, none whatsoever. Most of them ended when I expected to read more. Horror has scaled down these days..from the scary thrills and shocks we seemed to have stepped down into 'let's do something new, born again horror and give chills of a mysterious nature, where the reader is left wondering'..I mean come on. 

This needs to be rectified.

And oh there's more, so much more..and soon. 

Lily

Lily too.

They've been blossoming all over my house, dotted in little jars and long vase. Painting zephyrs of exotic perfumes, in faint whiffs, sometimes a full on eu de lily that consumes your every olfactory nerve when you walk into a room..only to disappear a moment later into a hint of a scent that trickles by. A sweet ambrosial net of echoes from places far away. 

dream

Did you see those secret creatures with flames?
it was us
the signs of the shadows sealed
from the absence of the presence 
we untangle our worries
seeking without seeing 
lost in the dawn and alive in the night 
sail through a dream 
primeval flame we unleash
leaving a wound without air without sound
an order which flows without singing 
slipping without a memory 
the cool stone, the spring, the water
a nest of copper, a hidden place
bitter certainty running from this world

The well

'Mother earth's very teat; it'll never dry'

"The well was always a mystery, it never dried you see. No matter what the season. It helped my people through the harshest summers, the longest droughts, even through war. The war never touched us either. We were lucky to be living near the mountain serene. We would escape to the mountains without a worry, and lay low till the danger died, and come back to our village and our well. We were a prosperous lot, only because of the well—water as calm as patience and as clear as a baby's conscience..it irrigated our fields, quenched our thirst, washed our clothes and streets"

'there was so much water that even thorns softened to petals'

"There was no bottom to that well. They said it was connected to the heart of mother earth, and mother loves her children, and gave, gave all it could. No matter how much water the village used, the well always had more. It must have been enchanted, for its water never became foul, even after months of disuse when my people abandoned the village to take shelter in the mountains. The war was on us and nobody knew who was fighting whom, only that all the young ones were being enlisted for a destined slaughter.
War is a hungry one, it is. It doesn't know what it wants, but has an empty belly all the same and gorges itself with bloodshed and tears and merciless malice. It grows and grows yet stays indifferent to sufferings and pain..craving carnage..its guts are filled with gore. It cleanses itself with bloodbaths and stays dirty still. Yes, war was upon us and all the little lads and men from all the neighbouring villages were forcefully drafted to die for a cause no one knew.
That was when we escaped to the mountains. We were just a small village of happy farmers. What did we know of war? Our children grew up sheltered in abundant fields, spent their summers climbing luxurious opulent flowering trees, ate the most exotic fruits and knew nothing save happiness. War was not for us or our children.. for we never saw pain, nor knew desolation and despair..We were content..all we knew was joy. The well kept us that way and we saw no reason to change what mother gave us..and so the whole village repaired to the mountains.

We waited for months knowing full well what was going down below. We heard noises, shouts, screams, smoke rising from distant lands. Everything below the mountains was shrouded in a feverish sickness of misery. There were blood curdling screams, we saw streams turn red with blood and later green with rotting flesh. There were flies and foul stench, and there were days when the skies turned black with flying scavengers. Thousands of vultures readying for a feast, hovering overhead, waiting to swoop and tear what was already dead.
The putrid stench of death grew so thick that we had to abandon our shelter and move upwards still, lest the contamination reach us too. But we were blessed and so we survived.
One day the skies cleared, the smoke didn't fill the air, the thin stream ran clear again and we knew it was time to make our descent.

We were worried about our village and mostly about our well. The sight that greeted us was most horrific. The streets were caked brown with dried blood. Most of the houses had burnt down, our fields looked barren—they were ravaged by war and hungry soldiers. The few houses that still stood had been ransacked and looked like they were used as shelters. Wasted rusting weapons and half rotten carcasses of humans and cattle alike littered back alleys, and there were no walls that weren't smeared with blood. Bloodied hand prints of dying soldiers, chipped skulls in large dried pools of what must have been blood, bits of dried flesh still stuck to some walls. Pieces of bones lay everywhere, some picked off clean by efficient scavengers, some still wrapped in skin that had turned to leather under the blazing sun.
 There was nothing ever as saddening as what we saw, thousands lay dead..some of them had disintegrated to dust, some still waiting be absorbed by soil..and then we came to our well. It looked as untouched as ever. The water sparkling, clear and sweet as we remembered. The well was fine, and we knew we would too.
The next few days were spent in cleaning the village, restoring our fields, rebuilding our homes and bringing life back to normal, for we'd heard that the war was now over, and thousands upon thousands died..with no clear signs of who actually won.
We washed the streets a hundred times over till all the blood that clung to it was but a memory, we washed the walls and repainted them. Reconstructed our broken canals, sowed more seeds, erected new trees and our village was back to as it looked. It shone with white brightness, exuded the fresh clean smells we'd loved, and life seemed like it was back to normal, until one day we saw small children..no bigger than six or seven lugging small pots and glasses into our village.

It was early morning, the sun shone red in a sapphire sky and we saw children, with sallow sad faces, hollowed eyes, dead smiles, ragged clothes carrying small clay pots and urns—whatever their little fingers could tighten around. They came into our village from neighbouring villages asking for water. They were expressionless, most looked like they'd been crying a hundred years and none of them was older than ten. They begged us for water, for they'd been walking since even before the sun came up..we told them to take as much as they'd like. Our magical mother god well stood proud, its never ending luminous clean water rippled ever so slightly by small cups and clay urns.
 By afternoon our village was teeming with hundreds of small children from nearing villages, taking water and leaving back for their homes. Most of their clay water pots broken, some chipped from the mouths, some carried only small bowls and copper cups, and it was a sight we'd never seen.
The children looked weary, most of them barefoot, their grief stricken eyes lifeless with dread..and they were all sad. So much sadness and mourn that it was heartbreaking to realize a child had seen so much suffering.
We asked why did they have to come all the way, why couldn't they send their elder brothers and sisters..and they told us that all their elders brothers and fathers had been forcefully enlisted into the war and now were either dead, missing or limbless, their sisters had gone missing or dead since hordes of soldiers showed up in their villages. Most of their fields and houses were burnt, the food was stolen and what was left behind were just small children and mothers.
The water they told us, was not to drink alone, but to wash away the endless tears of their mothers"

    "They have been crying since our fathers and brothers were taken away. They cried when our sisters didn't come back from the fields, when our fathers returned home with no legs, when they found our sisters dead in a heap of naked flesh by the river, when our brothers' half rotten bodies were sent back for burial. They've been crying since then, and we have no more water to wash away their tears"

"We shivered at their words, these innocent children..their words seeped in so much dread and what was most tragic was these children so young to only half understand the sick hurt of these wounds, with their tormented faces and questioning eyes, came each day clutching small pots and tiny glasses to our well. We let them take as much water as they liked, and after a few days they stopped coming..because our well had dried up."

Tell

Waking up at odd hours to read something nice..tell me warm things, fuzzy things, things that are bright. Coo in my ears or whisper in binary and tell..