The First Plague

The end of all things arrives first with insects. Dark tailed nymphs, like inverse butterflies, with golden dragon heads. All hours of the day, in perch hidden, they issue a humdrum, sawing of black lacquered thigh upon thigh. Where coursing, serrated calves meet, a shrill cry, a woman’s laughter. Keh-keh-keh.

Though I cannot see the devils (locusts, locusts I think them, straight from biblical affliction), that alarming cackle I perceive day in, day receding, whenever gray sky runs in color to pale bleakness -- the static snowstorm that chases away blackness when I close my eyes. And next, clouds violent, lilac breasted ladies corpses, charge through bosom-up, shadows roll over impotent fields. When the sun sinks at last, the gasping measures coming down from liquid climax, it blushes crimson, spent -- oh me! I write when long have I gone without enjoyment of human ultimatum in so fond a manner -- having spent herself dry. Blush to crimson and heaven’s wounds open fresh, gorged with blood, thick behind lilac breasts.

In this unnatural radiation, I tread the alien surroundings made home. A field once bearing crop wilts, stalks dun, but never erupting to dust and departing to all but memory. No, they hang in death throws unending, a timeless cry halted, once for all time.

Flowers here still make their vanity. Starbursts of tangerine leap and burst and dot sepia fields narrow and partitioned. Their beauty is but a side effect of their poison, organic venom that roots in ground, and withers vitality without castration from life. It issues from these rich buds the leaded haze that drowns all with breath in their own inner fluids.

Conscious suddenly of the cumbersome mask that clings like a deflated trunk from my face, I pass by the fields on a road as parched as an upper lip. Stretching, curved and cracked, transpiring to burst into plumpness. How strange! In this light, my icy-hearted flowers appear as blood seeping through asphalt. Her lips bled, I licked them dry. Never mind. Hardly has it been an hour (so it feels) from four horsed men passing, yet, foot copious, I kick loose rocks onto the shoulder of the road, tender thoughts of destruction entertaining a deranged mind.

To some clever device, I espy a row of beach homes, sweet little porches and blue, Chinese checkerboard shingles. A solid mirage of such seems a temptation, but though lush without -- oh sticky, coral, gasping lips! -- within I know can only be dry husks of life. Parchment skin stuck to faux wood flooring. Children under the beds maybe, curled slightly. Mother and father locked in embrace in the living room. Hollow eyes, cheekbones stripped too bone. These are only guesses. Maybe the poor deceased is a sallow young man. Passed away quietly in no ones arms. Silent scream precedes last gasp.

Pardon my morbid form, but nothing can thrive in this toxic Novemberland, not without a gas mask and the will to never settle or stray from the road. Keep moving. The loyal hound Death follows thereafter. How long since I camped on these same grounds and breathed tart, salty air, when the fields were lush and fertile? How delightful it must have been.

If not for those father-saken insects, I could slip into apocalypse like a loose glove. But the cackle maddens me, checks me, and I fight to press one step more. If only to hear silent bliss in soul resound…

Sunset. The locusts of hell-wrath scream aloud. Keh-keh-keh.

The insects scream. She laughed, lips transpiring apocalyptic vapor.

She laughed.
 

Reviews

[Tony]

There was this guy named Mencken who said;
'Young writers, if they can refrain from doing so, should not hesitate.'
Shiloh here is a clear exception to that rule.
This is an excellent story in my opinion.
Colorful. Hard. Interesting.