Kyle Muntz - Voices

and wanted to point, a long breaking fingernail. He struggled, vomiting streams of

spiders. Some made eight legged escapes from cranium, spreading concentric from

the center, crawling.

"Jesus," I said, and realized, once and for all. "I thought you got away, but you

never even left." The world didn't have room for him, erasing. It came with one eye

and false, false reasons, making shit excuses, to chase the wretch away. "I always

knew it," I said. "You weren't worth a try."

He moaned. From either side he'd sprouted the beginning of four new arms.

When they were done he would have eight legs. Achromatic down, gossamer,

covered him. He shook in pain. Across his forehead a gash split open. The skin slid

away over a red eye. He saw the world the color of blood. Heated, unfriendly. In

unification, we hated him.

I know

what

you're

thinking, he said.

(I hated him) In the life. He was sickening

as

wet dirt

sprouting worms

in

the rain.

He gaped with one evil eye. The dumpster flew at me.::::::::::::::::::::

James took me with him to a concert. In concert places the kids were my age. They had long hair and wore very strange clothing. They danced. Pyrotechnics wove blazing discoloration, flitting brilliantly on a crooked shoulder, the flatness, shadowing the bridge of the nose. In moving they culminated to an absolute mass of randomness, in unification.

The band sucked. They wasted space on the stage.

"Lets get out of here," I said. "You know I can't stand concerts anymore." "Yeah," he said, "I know."

::::::::::::::::::::

He yelled at me.

No, language can't capture such

disfigurement.

He shook his fist, shot spittle, and bulged uncontrollably. Still,

he didn't realize

I'd already gotten

his

mailbox.

::::::::::::::::::::

Inhaling, I dived. It was something like a commando roll, just I wasn't a commando. I landed on shards of broken glass. Still sliding (and quickly), the dumpster buckled, the hull throbbed, and it belly flopped against the wall. Handfuls of trash flung into the air- a mass of mothball, plastic bags, drain cleaner, rotten fruit, dirty boxes- and bounced against the wall. They made a wet, sopping sound, that had different layers in it; bringing to mind simultaneously puddles of rain and flushing toilets; and fell all together, with the patter of wrung paper towels, thumbing at the bottom. Flecks of blood escaped me. I cringed.

He raised an arm, still gasping. Tunnels opened all atop his cranium, and his skull became a pin-cushion of swirling, whirling eyes. They swept, squinting for image. He saw in all directions panoramic. A wave scuttled to me. They made crackling sounds. I found myself wishing I'd brought a hefty jar of poison.

At all sides, concrete cracked. Directly in front, a slab tore free, rocking the walls. He'd cornered me as a consequence of poorly understood mathematical function, calculoid symmetries yielding ratios pertaining to the capabilities of the human body in unfamiliar situations, gauging reaction time breathing heart rate and muscle stipulations. Even now, disfigured, he understood nothing of self awareness.

The slab was five feet high. Rushing, it tore to me, tide breaking stone, sweating dull powder to either side. It had a face, oh yes: flatness and old markings in the sedimentary skin, unseeing, unthinking. It rushed. The garbage hadn't been touched in almost half a year. It made me wish I was made of a fortified grade of titanium, the unbreakable kind, that had none of the weakness of skin, though maybe I could afford to go with steel.

I climbed. The dumpster, still there, provided height, at exact odds to uselessness. Lunging, I lipped the top and passed it over, unbelievably touching the top with the back of one leg. Until now, I'd never thought of myself as being made of water. In the most strenuous of situations, I surprise myself.

::::::::::::::::::::

The mountains

were rough as

granulated

steel

on the way up, though the higher I got it gave way to the slickness

of icy cold, numbing the tips of fingers. I could

manage to pull myself

because I was strong, apparently,

though I'd never thought of myself as being strong

before.

Up above,

the moon

was

very

large.::::::::::::::::::::

In tiredness, he choked. Dead spiders lie to either side, flattened against the wall, pasted to a layer of fleshy juice, searing in venom. Evacuating strains poured from him, a million scraping legs. They made webs in direction, taking to the walls, an arachnoid spreading. Stumbling, I took hold of a cylindrical molding, composed mainly of iron, which in more casual times I might have referred to as a pipe, if not for the juvenile connotations. Looking out (two hollow, outflowing sockets and fifty red holes), he feared me.

sWINGING

I lopped him through the face, cutting horizontal past the brittle shield of bone. Visage came untangled. His skull hit a wall, still flying, and buckled to the ground. Fifty crimson miniatures acclimated to him, dislodged. They were red. Their backs bore bleeding eyes. They crawled from tiny holes, wriggling all over. They gasped for breath in the merciless outside.

From Jacob's opening sprang something covered almost entirely in eyes and hair. It had sixteen legs and clung with them, letting go sounds of squishing flesh, merciless parasitism. It probed his ears, clung through them; set staves through nose and mouth, staring at me. The whole bulbous mass of it writhed, a vilified strain, destructive.

::::::::::::::::::::

Stabbing

with the pipe,

I pegged it

to the wall

behind.

These people were sick, and their campfires were a mess of bleeding horseflesh

and badly tended crops. Sickly grinning, they wore masks

of hollow leather skin that never stopped grinning. In conjunction,

the whole evil lot of them, they

laughed together, dumping blood drawings

on canvasses made of the same leathered skin.

Looking down, from atop

a high mountain, I

saw them all at once, taking in their stench.

They smelled like

a world without a shower, tasted

like the droppings of an infected animal

about to die, laying

at midday in a sweating pool of sun, green ooze pouring from the gaps in its skin.

rebuked me, by

setting obstacles, by hurling dangers, but I have

no fear of coldness, that that which remembers

the emptiness

at the origin of the soul, unmoving in itself, The mountain in its harshness, as all around, niched in the center of the universe, a

brocade of lights

broke out swirling

to swallow all

sense of center, a howling dip

in the archways.

I climbed, squinting, and the mountain

fed me the remains

of old bones.

Licking white remnants, I grew,

(tiring)

ever closer

to the moon.

::::::::::::::::::::

She wasn't there alone.

(That's not to say.)

She took my world and refracted it, laced furiously in pandemic voices. She gave me fury, and I traced it back to her, my epidemic queen, she was, we danced all

night in cool moonlight, and talked about meetings, about rain.

The police came for us, but we were already gone. And even though people

told stories about her, unless I believed in them, very few, if any, were true. With her I was a vilified, expressionist sort, of their, the kind who couldn't

help but grasping

for a taste of absolute beauty. Her formlessness, her voluptuous sense of

the awesome, dug tunnels in me, and let flow a whole

purifying infinity outflow, rushing water