BLUE HAWAII sugawara koushi

prelude.

 

          IF YOU WERE TO PRY APART the thin coagulation of bone and cartilage webbing across the revoltingly crude configuration of his heart, you would find the cavity detailed in a startling assortment of indigo and navy. Each child traces the delicate capillaries lining their wrist and wonders if their blood is blue, despite a well-educated, well-off adult cancelling their curious behavior with a rumorless science-based confirmation that: indeed, if they were to open their veins warm crimson blood would tide forth.

Not to further worship his own god complex, Aoki Daniel likes to think that pain is his old friend. Anything that pain does can be forgiven if he just closes his eyes and clenches his jaw. He likes to think that he is a god forged from hellfire and close to touching the stars.

He knows that pain is fleeting and temporary, but somehow this pain remained rooted in him through vignettes of blank memory and a toneless lullaby uttered just out of earshot. The black spores of his everlasting pain spread through his body, asphyxiating his young crimson lifeline and yet, Aoki Daniel is still breathing. He is breathing corrupted air with his blood cold as ice. He is living on borrowed time in a body that he no longer can claim as his own. Each choked breath and each day torn off his calendar marks a day the devil has not yet reclaimed him.

          Somewhere along his neat childhood marked with the thick lines of dull crayons, Daniel got tangled between the brightly colored lines. He fell through the cracks, hurtling toward and extremely atrocious end for a child. The devil saved him. Pushing him back up through the hole he had fallen through and patching the remains with quicksand warm as a child's security blanket.

No, the devil does not perform miracles for free, don't bother asking. It just happens to prefer its snacks with a little malignancy. They taste better that way.

Aoki Daniel returned to life that day, his organs eating themselves ravenously as he attempted to ward off his newfound insatiable thirst to watch others suffer. The opiates could only stave off so much of the burning pain in his heart. He returned to life without worthy ambition and near incomprehensible greed.

          And then the day came when he found an angel.