He sits with his thoughts in the burning room, the black, acrid smoke billowing up around him. He wonders when the fire will become a part of him; he wonders when he will become a part of the fire. Is this body of sagging skin, weak bone, collapsed muscle, and slow synapses made more of smoke or the reds and oranges of the flame? Will he burn fast or will he burn slow? What will his first thoughts be when the flame licks at the dermis, turns it red, then blackens as it rips its way across his surface? Will he scream or will he swallow the flame and then suffer in forced silence, his throat a fire-coated desert?
The only sound filling his ears: the crackle of the fire touching every piece of wood, every surface, making the world pop and snap around him as little bits of flaming debris fill the air around him before fizzling out in the smoke. The air surrounding him feels pregnant, filled with heat and force and weight. It consumes the room, becomes the room, takes up residence in its corners and its floorboards. It coats the walls and the ceiling, becomes every piece of accouterments that once decorated the space and make the room its own. Frames of pictures become red waves suspended in the air, the images contained within slowly charring from the outside in.
He can see the walls taking on the ashen look he’s seen in so many shows and movies in the past. He can see the black ivy-like tendrils start at the floor and work their way up as if crawling to find fresh air somewhere near the top of the room. The wallpaper burns and curls, the old glue beneath it coming back to life under the heat before losing its stickiness altogether. The walls seem to fall in on themselves, but it is just the strips of wallpaper sliding off the surfaces, fainting into the flames and allowing themselves to be caught up in the burn like willing, atrophied victims.
Behind the wall, scorched framing and exposed wiring, the rubber coating of which begins to melt off in drips and puddles on the floor before being burned off. The smell mingles with the smoke and gives the air around him a tang he had not expected. The strength of the smell briefly overpowers his brain, supersedes the heat and the burn for a moment as his synapses fight to hold on to a memory the smell elicits. But time is not a luxury; the memory flashes against the inside of his mind before fizzing out and disintegrating as the fire does the same thing to various parts of his body.
He can hear his skin bubbling up, becoming little pockets of pink and pus, over the sound of the fire now raging around him within the room. He tries to focus his attention on the sound rather than the pain that seems to be less around him and more within him, burning him from the inside out. He sees red with his eyes, but in his mind, the heat is a blinding white that steals his vision and cripples his movement. His fingers curl up into themselves, melting together into some kind of strange hand deformity; a paddle, a fin, a reminder of what a pleasure it was to burn. There is no part of him that does not succumb to the flame; there is no part of him that does not succumb to the pain. He is a single, fiery nerve perpetually struck and inflamed.
He inhales the smoke, feels its thick and wispy texture fill him up, mingling with the heat that sears him from within. He can feel it snake down into holes formed by melt. If he looks down, he can see grey tendrils dancing outside the scorched holes of his body; is the smoke entering or exiting? He cannot tell.
Soon, his hands are gone, victims of the fire.
Soon, his legs are gone, victims of the flame.
Soon, there is no skin; he is melted muscle and charred skeleton sitting in the burning room.
Soon, the heat dissipates; in the charred room of black, the smoke is all that’s left.
Soon, there is no sound.
Soon, the room is quiet again, a mausoleum of ash and forgotten memory cemented into the blackened walls with his screams.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
It didn’t know how long it had been falling. A minute? A day? A year? It spread its body out wide like a starfish, hoping to slow its descent through the air, but this only served to give the wind more surface to erode, more skin and sinew to eat away as it seemed to plummet without ever finding an end to it all.
The minute (or year) of falling continued on, unfettered by logical thought or action. The air changed temperature from cold to less cold. Its face hurt, its fingers seemed to scream their own agony, though it could barely bring them to its face to see their slow erosion, the air slicing its way through the webbing between digits and turning its calloused palms into bloody topographies of worlds once explored, but which it could barely remember anymore.
Another year passes as it falls through a squadron of thick clouds, stiffer and whiter in person than one might believe. It sees grey sky and darker clouds on the horizon and, for the briefest of moments, it wonders how it would feel to have the sky’s lightning flash and strike it and then course through its body. Would it light up like a firework and be emblazoned upon the memory of the skyline? Or would it simply be struck dead without so much as a thought to make the experience worth it?
A long day passes and still it tumbles ever downward, the earth below never seeming to get any closer. It feels the piercing wind against its face, feels the skin finally begin to give way and rip off in tiny pieces. Was that blood it felt across its face, blurring up its vision…or was it tears? Bits of skin rip, flayed off by the force, detach and fall alongside it, as if the pieces of its body want to fall into oblivion in tandem with it.
And on it falls, fast and hard through the blindingly blue sky and through dense clouds as the earth seems to remain far, far away. When would it stop falling? When would its skin stop getting flayed off? Soon, it had lost all its dermis, torn away by the whipping air. It had become a thing of bleeding muscle and tendon flying through the atmosphere, soon exposing nerves and feeling every gust.
Soon, the muscle begins disintegrating and falling off the bone. Its nerves begin whipping around in the air, knotting themselves up around the bones and joints and ligaments, making it impossible to move in any real, manageable way. It is now a prisoner to the air, accepting the slow torture of being ripped apart during flight.
Soon, the nerves dissolve and the skeleton fell, then fell apart, its bones clinking against each other. Like sand, the femurs and the tibias and the ball sockets and the hipbone and the breastplate all begin to fade away at the forced erosion. The earth is close now, but it wouldn’t know that. By the time its essence returns to its earthly home, it will become dust and that dust has been swallowed up by the eddying winds of the landscape, spreading its ashes far and wide.
Soon, the wind dies down, stills, quiets.
Soon, the horizon dims.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
She remembered bits and pieces of the violence.
Her husband had gone to work for the soldiers, not knowing what the job would be. He had done so to protect her and their child, but still they came for her, uncaring or disbelieving her screams, telling them such as they ransacked her village and burned down its homes. The dust swirled around the village with the movement of the soldiers; little gusts of brown dirtied up the sky and made it tough to see anyone else across the way. Their jeeps and their boots and their yelling allowed confusion to reign. Soon, each home was empty, and she could hear the sound of fire and then many fires and then the laughter of the men who had set those fires ablaze.
They’d been forced to lie face down in the dirt. Her wild breath sent it eddying up and onto her lips, moist with fear. One by one the screams came as villagers of all ages and genders felt their clothing get sliced through with crusted blades and then ripped off of them unceremoniously. They were left to cry and writhe naked in the dirt. Men wept; women screamed; children cowered and howled. All continued to face the ground, prone and vulnerable to whatever the soldiers had in mind.
Then the sound of a hundred guns going off in unison.
The sound of an entire village slaughtered at once.
And then two soldiers would pick them up by their hands and feet, or one soldier would drag them across the ground, their lifeless bodies thrown haphazardly off into the foliage or onto a mock funeral pyre in the center of the village. She, however, had been dragged across the dirt and the bloody muck and thrown into the back of a truck, her body thrown carelessly onto the dirty bodies of her neighbors and her family and those few strangers who had been passing through the village when the violence came to dance with them. The dust from the village square erupted around the spinning tires of the soldiers’ vehicles. Soon, their bodies were coated in a thin layer of the stuff, turning their dark skin a powdered red.
Though her life had been taken by any one of a hundred bullets shot that afternoon, her lifeless eyes remained open and seeing as the truck bounced along uneven dirt roads across open fields where other soldiers stood guard and through jungle canopies where sunlight barely made a dent through the leaves above.
She was near the bottom, stacked the way they were. Her limp body lay in such a way that she could see the cloudless blue sky between the limbs of another man above her as they jostled along. Her head lolled back and forth, knocking into other body parts as the truck ambled along through the landscape, the sky never seeming to change until it darkened and the starlight came out to play.
Then there was more jungle.
Soon, the truck stopped. It moved in reverse and the bodies above her shifted and moved, pressed in on her. Had she any breath left in her, it would’ve been expelled and her lungs crushed. Soon, the truck stopped moving completely. The voices of men filled the night air alongside that of the jungle’s smaller inhabitants.
Soon, she could feel the weight being lifted off of her.
Soon, she was being lifted herself and then she was flying through the air. Falling may be a better word for it.
Soon, she was lying sprawled out in the pit atop a mountain of other bodies.
The truck started up again and left, its tires spitting out dust and dirt into the mass grave. When it all settled, she spied a man at the edge of the pit out of the corner of her eye. She recognized her husband immediately. He looked worn out, gaunt, empty, as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen his face, but she was happy that his was one of the last she would see before the jungle would take her in its earthen arms, cocoon her and embrace her, and then take both of them into its bosom during moonlight two nights later.
Soon, they would be together again.
Soon, she would have him next to her.
Soon, they would be one with the jungle.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
They were once disconnected. Less of a unit and more scatter-brained, like bouncing atoms. But now, they walked together, side by side and hand in hand, row upon row of people simply walking into bodies of water wherever bodies of water existed. They could feel the sand and the silt fill up their shoes and their sandals; the water soaked their socks and their pants. Soon, they were waist deep, then chest deep. Then they were completely submerged, walking until their legs could take them no more.
A very few broke rank and tried to run out of the water, their minds grasping the what that was to come, but the force of the human flow kept them from leaving and pushed them back, back, back into the water with the rest until all were soaked, all were water-kissed.
This happened at the edges of lakes and ponds, of streams and rivers, of seas and oceans, inlets and lagoons. The mass of bodies giving themselves up to the blue or the red or the brown or the clear was pandemic, and yet so few fought against whatever urge it was that kept their hands clasped together as they all walked to watery graves across the globe.
One could argue that those walking into the ocean may have had it the easiest; the tide of bodies behind them pushing them onward into the tides of water in front of them, the sea shelf dropping off considerably into the dark below. The marine life looked on from dead gardens of coral as the bodies slow-walked or floated past, their masses filling up what space remained and still left untarnished and unruined by human hands.
Soon, they stopped walking or floating downward, and they became one with the water. Their skin puckered, became inhuman to look at from the soak. Prunes holding onto prunes, wrinkles lapping up what they could before the skin could take no more. They opened their mouths and drank of their surroundings, filling their bellies and their lungs with equal aplomb. For a while their bodies stayed there in place, and then they began to sway with the currents, hair and body moving in beautiful, lifeless unison as their unseeing eyes remained open and cloudy.
Soon, the fish and the turtles and the crabs and the algae began to feast upon the bodies that lay prone to their hunger. Bits of skin nibbled off, bits of hair falling off and floating away to God only knew where. All water was mausoleum.
Soon, the skin began falling off in places where the animals had stopped pecking.
Soon, the skin was gone. So, too, was its pruned nature.
Soon, the bone below was visible and began to take on the life of the ocean.
Soon, the people of the oceans became gardens of living coral.
Soon, the people of the rivers became natural dams.
Soon, the people of the lakes became myth beneath the surface.
Soon, the people of the ponds became visible as the ponds dried up and revealed their standing catacombs below, the faces of the dead stretched upward to the sky as if in prayer.