Upon a strange and barren plain, here you stand, here you are slain.

A Story by David Rouken

An exercise in pure expression

Dear reader, take a trip, down the thorny, blackened, garden path of my mind.

It’s a dark place, purple, black, occasionally orange. Pulsing veins carry darkened blood through the ceilings of a dark tunnel. Triangles, throbbing, moving organically with fluid, cells, enzymes, pathogens. There is a ringing sound, piercing, yet undefined, a sold frequency, a wall of sound, if you will. It blocks out your every thought, you might hold your ears in (pain?), but you can’t stop the sound of a thousand little carnivorous insects burrowing into your mind, they come from inside. You can hear your every blackened thought as though they became corporal and began to dance around a fire in front of you. Face them, demons, horned devils, black, sneering faces, staring, waiting, watching, but for what? Only you know.

Your twisted apparitions sing a song, a discordant rising baseline, mixed with a vile, piercing treble, the music is green, black, orange, red, violet, blood-purple, coffee, then white. The white tears into your soul, feel yourself scream and then be drowned out. Live my demons, live your demons, let them sit in a circle, and drink tea and discuss politics and the like. The demons are you, me, your friends, god, heaven, hell death, life, love, sex, screams, silence, chocolate, skin, blood, organs, disease, the rotting faceless skulls of old men who died in battle. Their music tells of your soul, rising, crimson, cinnamon, pepper, life, organic, artificial, spectacular, screams, piercing silence, the kind that strangles your thoughts, but lets you embrace eternity at once. Feel it, the blood rushing to your head, collapse, die, rot, incorporate into the soil, be born again as one of the demons as the world shakes and turns to dust like your soul. Banshee inhalations.

White

Screaming white.

Bright screaming white.

Abyss.

Onrush of nausea, vomit and purge yourself of the troubles of life, every emotion.

Grand catharsis.

Please call again.