Disintegration ~ A prelude to SMG4:// Leviticus

Disintegration

~

All things are made of memory. When you witness something you long remember – in a place you long remember it, a piece of you remains there, a piece of the lime in its concrete foundation. You are made of the people who remember you. You are made by what you yourself remember. And when your body fails you, you shall persist as long as this living Earth knows your name.

~

Powder fills my eyes as soon as I open them. It feels cold, like snow. But the stinging doesn't melt away. I try to scream, and the dust pours into my mouth, down my windpipe, filling up my lungs until they weigh me down. All I can taste is gunpowder and burning wood. I claw and flail, breaking through every inch of the ground I can. But, it feels so heavy; the dust is crushing me, strangling me, drowning me. I close my eyes again, feeling around in the divot I've created. My eyes cry, and the tears seep into the dirt. I stop breathing. I don't need to breathe anymore.

I search for the surface. My hands snake up through the sand, burrowing like moles until the weight of the ground feels like my fingernails are going to peel off. I twist and contort my body, feeling the sand fall away, fall into me. Eventually, the sand begins to fall through me.

When my fingers finally breach the surface, they don't shoot up like a tree. I don't frantically try to dig away the last of the dust and dirt I'm buried under, breathlessly trying to cling to life. I've realized it's too late for that, it has been too late since before I woke up. My hand rises slowly, expecting to feel wind breaking on my forearm. But there's nothing above me. It feels as though my hand has gone numb.

My hand dips back and brushes away the dirt covering me. There was less of it above me than I thought, only enough to submerge me a few inches deep. I can even kick my legs off the ground without a struggle. I sift away the dry dust from my face and touch my forehead. All I feel is the ground underneath me. I pad the sand, drag my fingers along the ground, trying to trace out my head and neck. But, nothing's there, it seems. I blink my eyes; there's no dirt in them anymore. Maybe I just forgot about the stinging pain in my eye sockets. Maybe I had forgotten that my heart wasn't beating either.

The sky is black, unmoving. It's as though I had never opened my eyes or even closed them. I stare up; no light returns. And yet, it is not dark, only black, like it was painted such a color. I can hear wind, a low rumbling wind that seems to fly off the ground and make it tremble. But, I cannot feel it. I could not feel the air the moment my hand emerged into it. My hands stay pressed down into the sand and I turn my head, raise it up out of the hole I lay in.

The horizon stretches – on, outward, upward – bending in the distance until it rises like an immense canyon at the very edge of my vision rising endlessly into the jet-black sky. I can see every inch of it: A vast, empty gamut of gray dunes expands out all around me, even beneath the darkness of the void-sky. It's ash, I realize, every grain of sand is a flake of ash and dust. Particles of dust hang in the air, static and still. I finally sit up, getting my bearings. I raise my hand and set it behind me.

My hand drops below where I thought my body sat. Not looking, I feel around, but it's as though my arm is dangling off the edge of a mountain. I turn my head to look and see my forearm, submerged in ash that appeared to be falling through. Suddenly, my legs, still half-buried in the ash, buckle and fold. They dangle over an edge as if there was no ground underneath them.

Then, I'm falling.

The alarm causes me to leap out of the hole, forcing the heaps of ash up and away. I'm standing now, head bent down staring at my feet. I look forward, staring far beyond the base of the ground. And I begin to sink. I look down again, and the ash-sand catches me by the heel, pouring into the gap. To my dismay, I begin to realize something:

If I ever look forward, I'll disappear. If I ever pick the sole of my foot off the ground, it may not be there when I set that foot down again. This place is and is-not as I perceive it, as I sense and remember it.

I don't recognize the body I look down at. It doesn't even seem to be there, only an abstract outline of me. It's blurry, as though my very being was smudged and wiped like a censored photograph. I wave my hands in front of my face. All I see are two vague shapes, barely discernible. Even as my muscles tilt and turn my hands, I can't make out my fingers. My body is a drop of ink in water, bleeding into what surrounds me and never taking shape. I move my hands together, and they collide...somehow. Maybe I had only forgotten what my hands looked like.

I begin to wander, head bent down over the ground, shuffling my feet. Step by step, I move across the ocean of gray. I never had a destination. Maybe I forgot what it was. Dunes become an indiscernible wave of up-and-down. I begin to feel time slip through my fingers as the landscape repeats, unending, unchanging. It's as though millions of years have passed, condensed and focused into a singular moment, like my first steps, my most recent, and the countless steps in between happened at the very same time. Maybe I forgot the moment when time stopped, or what it even meant to me.

My vision begins to blur, slowly. Blindness seeps into my vision until my eyes waste away. Then, every mental image I've ever had is lost. I lose what the ground is, what it's supposed to be. I lose the color of the sky, what color was supposed to be. I lose my voice, my words, my thoughts. The most basic operations of my brain escape me: direction, number, object. Eventually, the ground gives way and I am left a formless, senseless thing. All I know is that I am. I am... and I feel cold.

Oh God, I feel cold. Even as the ache of my feet is lost too, the cold persists somehow. All that I feel, all that I am, is ten thousand needle-points of frost, plunging into my soul and picking it apart. It purges through my whole decaying self. Even as the self withers away – my form further becoming formless, even as my mind shuts down – everything I know drifting away - the cold enshrouds me, growing stronger and stronger. The single, unbearable sensation of freezing forces thoughts in my conscience to take shape. Senses, thoughts I can't describe clump and clutter together like refugees of a storm seeking shelter.

And then... I witness my final memory.

Somehow, as my ability to recall thoughts and information breaks down, I can still sense everything as though I am still whole, alive even. It's as vivid as a real waking moment.

~

I lie in a plain cot, barely able to breathe. Chills snake up my back, making me seize and shiver unnaturally. All I can muster is to look up at the ceiling of the lightless room. Fever stirs my eyes, warping my vision as shadows loom and sway all around me. Bile fills my lungs like water, boiling up and lashing out and tearing at the back of my mouth with each choking gasp.

The dancing, pulsing shapes on the ceiling are suddenly interrupted as a long sharp volume of light extends from the wall. The door has opened a bit. Someone tall stands in the doorway, watching me. They watch me groan and toss restlessly, fighting just to breathe. They seem afraid to come near.

I stay motionless, unable to look up at them in my state. All I can do is plead with the silence. Beg that, despite everything, they'd understand how badly I want them to be next to me now. How badly I want them to come to my bedside and cradle me like a child, even if I might end up killing them too.

They don't seem to be crying. They shut the door again, as though no one had opened it.

~

The cold pounds at my form, grinding on a single, nebulous point is space that every last remnant of what I am is centered upon, viciously tearing away at all the seams that made up that subjective center. As the final threads of my lucidity fray and unravel and snap, the cold continues to oppress the thing I am. And, as the reality I no longer sense, no longer understand, no longer remember, am no longer a part of melts away, I cry out.

~

I cry out, as though I still had the strength to speak. I force air through my heavy, heaving chest and mouth my final wish.

"... don't... go...!"

~

But, the Earth has forgotten my name...

And I have so forgotten the world...

So, I am no longer. Consumed by the ash beneath my feet.

[end of short story]