Circle of Cryptor Child and His Daddy (from Heaven)

Sally And Her Daddy Were Feasts For The Worms, The Cryptor Child Was Next

Ooooooh

                Oooooooh-ohhhhhhh-ahhhhhhhh

                The Man was singing when he faded. He was close. Thud-crack. The contortion of leather straps and the rusting crunch of a low gun belt, a pendulum at the thigh.

                ‘Ooooh- Sally got her daddy and she brought him uphill, ooh the water’s loose dear but a’fresh if for your fear, ooh�"'

                The sun was all there was.

                ‘Ooh the last time I tried to kill you I couldn’t ‘an God knows I cried. No matter how hard ‘ah tried. Now things are different, I have you at my feet ‘an a gun to ‘ma side.’ The sounds receded, the man wavered. ‘Make peace with your gods. And then I want you to count for me.’

                No god could accept Him. Not anymore. So, He counted.

                ‘One,’ a lump of bloody spit curdled in His throat which was tracked with a scaly dryness, of which only the air breathed in the wastelands could muster. His eyes were pasted over with a thin film of crusted tears. The sweat on His brow loosened and dripped.

                ‘Ohhhhh, Sally ‘an her daddy,’

                ‘…two…’

                The tick of a gun’s cradle lifted across the air, the barrel spun and landed hard in place. ‘Sally ‘an ‘er daddy. Ooh, ah, ooh.’

                His chest was raw and beating, exposed to the blistering sun. His battered waist was bathed in a dull, hot sting. ‘…three…’

                ‘Don’t tire on me, boy, I’ll bring you back ‘an I’ll kill you again.’

                Not again, he thought, but too late- a swamp of black ate the light of the sun and met His face like a battering ram from the heavens. The sounds He released on impact were incomprehensible, and made The Man laugh.

                ‘Keep counting for me big boy. Ohhhh, an Sally an er daddy they had a parrot on high, cawing got him fed and then he’d whizzed up to fly…’

                Then, like the timid wheeze of a crippled animal: ‘…five…’

                ‘You ‘skippin a number on me big boy?’

                Then, quickly: ‘four,’ too late. The boot fell, a shadowed sole pursued His broken body and found itself a home across the track of His snarled, broken ribs. He wheezed and gasped, the sting was as if a rib had unhooked and pierced His heart. Breathing became a choppy and difficult ordeal.

                The Man laughed.

                ‘Five…’

                The click of the revolver. The blotting of the sun behind a fog of clouds.

                A gust of crows squealed into the sky and wound a funnel across the sun. “Sally killed her daddy an her daddy killed sally. Sally an her daddy were food for the worms, bad food, enough to make their tiny stomachs churn. But the worms ate on and found themselves a home. The flesh hardened up, they made a toilet from the bone. ‘Look ere, ma!’ whistled ‘lil boy joe, a worm with a hat and his a*s deep in the bone. ‘come here ma, look what I found! A thought so dark a god would find it profound!”

                A kick. A scoff and a wheeze.

                ‘’God don’t listen to the thoughts of ‘lil dead Sally, she don’t matter for s**t’, said mother worm,’

                A kick. Then black.

 

***

               

                The world, to Him, was this: a ticking photograph. Sometimes black, sometimes white. The stars paid visits in short little spades. The stars were like gasses waving and blowing from space. A vision seen through the slit of tender eyelids. A vision so hauntingly pure which invited him back to life, if only just to see it.

                The air was thick and near watery when the evening fell over and the cold met His wounds like an ethereal kiss. He consumed his breaths slowly with great pain, the wind chopped through the clotted blood in the tract of His throat. Everything, from the fluttering weeds to his side to the directional flow of the moon was inviting Him back.

                His opened chest became a home for nature slowly. The split chorus of his ribs, the fluttering of loose flesh in the soft breeze. His eyes were charred to dry stones. The moon greeted him, then fell back out of sight. If he could move, he would dislodge the bullet sunk firmly into the crook of two ribs. Like a molten orb gnawing away at him, a pain so present and crippling that he could hardly bare to think, or to see; only to sleep, and to dream. To dream of how life might have been.

                The light and dark twisted in and out of each other, blanketed by his fleeting eyelids.

                ‘…six…’

                The sun pinched His head as the photograph flickered back slowly, His hair warped like a flaccid chord along his face.

                ‘…seven…’

                Nothing. The stars faded to chalk black. The world was the inside of his drowsy eyelids. The sounds of the world were of naught but the blood rush inside Him. The smell was of nought but the coppery dead stench of his own exposed guts.

                ‘Eight…’

                It was a long time before he realised that He wasn’t dying. A lot of the time was simple denial. He expected death, and was to greet it with open arms, any minute now.

But the acceptance came at a hard cost. One he couldn’t not bare to think. He sometimes felt the belching fluid from his stomach rise and gargle on his mouth. He felt the crusted vomit dry to a scum on his face. He wished he could look at the stars while nature overcame him. He threaded into the weeds of the earth and matted hard into the soil. He became the weeds. He became worse than the weeds. His smell attracted the wet lips of any predator to stroll the Wastelands of Noman. He wished he could count while the shadow of a beasts’ tongue rolled across his face. He wished he could hear that song one last time, over the vacant, omnipresent hiss of the Wastelands.

                Sally an her Daddy were food for the worms, sometimes he was envious of Sally and her Daddy. At least they had the eternal pleasure of black death. A toilet in the bone.

                The long wheeze of a predator nearby snored by as he reached decade four of life after death. He felt the brushing vibration of its low purr before it made a feast from His bowels.

                He would sometimes remember things. Sometimes. His memory was as mortal as man. He recalled the sensation of The Man’s boot against his face, and He remembered such fondly. The sensation of feeling, in any regard, even in memory, was happy.

                His jaw fell from his head as the decades fell to centuries. The jaw weakened over generations of wind-induced fragility until the dust-skin tore. His tongue fell with it, a dry strip like a scrag of a weed. He wondered what would be next… maybe his eyes… his ears… his�"

                It was his nose. Thinned to a crusted notch on his face and dried to the bone, it shook and fell of in a tight gust of wind.

                His heart, he presumed, was the size of a raisin and had the structural integrity of such. Perhaps it slid through the ribs one day and out through the open slot.

                Sally an her Daddy did much down in Hell, loitered with the ghosts and looked for forgiveness on sale.

                The pleasure of the cold wind was one he missed. He missed everything, from the wet slick of his tongue when he pronounced his “T”’s to the basic, primal indulgence of pushing out a s**t. The warm stream of ejecting piss. The crunching pain of a cold swim. The raw burst of pain at the receiving end of a hit.

                He sometimes wondered what he might look like. That was another thing he missed- his own reflection. His silken curvature, his angular jaw and the narrow slit of his eyes. He wondered if he had any hair left.

                “…T…T….Teh…’

                He couldn’t remember the number. How it was said, how it sounded. He couldn’t even imagine it. He couldn’t complete the counting which would take him to the sweet, sweet release of death. He clawed for it with fingers the weight of a petal and nails as hard as wet paint.

                He bled for it with blood dusted over the centuries, packing the air with the ungodly stench of His ruined body.

                ‘Th�"the--…’

                The only words left in His consciousness were these, plain and simple: “God don’t listen to the thoughts of ‘lil dead Sally, she don’t matter for s**t”