Friday, January 13, 2006

Week 2: The Hominids are the next big thing (prose)

In the enclosed space, there are no lights, only the soft sound of a river rolling over rocks; as it had for millions of years, a tide of water moving over the forgotten skulls of hominids who, like salmon, performed sexual reproduction at death. It would seem that as the male released himself into the female hominid, the female would pierce his breast plate with a whittled away stone sharp blade. She would sit and watch as her once virile husband slowly extinguished before her and fell lifeless into the stream. Imagine hundreds of couples coming to one spot only to dispose of their true loves, a mass extinction of middle aged, midlife-crisis ridden men. The river would run a fiery red teasing out the mystery to the color of Arizona river beds.


So as these male hominids perished from the hand of their loving spouses, their blood would mix with left over semen and sweat and move over their still bodies. All the village would stand upon the hill over looking the river moving between barren green hills, dreaming of a sunset not as crimson as the massacre below them. After 3 weeks, the males would be retrieved, wrapped in animal furs, and left to become one with the environment. With the moon still watching, the females would pretend to sleep, their tears finally allowed to come forth, the pain of the situation rumbling under their pillows.

Even with such a massive display of murder, these ancient peoples did not deny the necessity of their nature. As we should know, nature is unflinching, indifferent to its inhabitants. It waves its sword and hacks apart limbs with no remorse, its sole protector from justice being the concepts of time and memory loss. The rituals of various cultures have long passed from the minds of its new residents on Earth. However, the cruelty of culture lives on in the world's drive to purchase fire arms, watch violence on telly, and preoccupy themselves with the memory of the past. A past so ingrained in all that we are, we cannot shake its glare. It lives and breathes throughout every tissue, cell, and atom.

Our protagonist now stands naked before the mirror, his muscles each highlighted by the shifting candle flame. It is like a torch leading him down tunnels into another time, another forest, another night with only the sense of smell to lead the way. In this peaceful moment, the walls surrounding him seem riddled with wildlife bent on chewing the tendons from his brittle bones. He only remembers the last few days in his room with songs of new wave tragedy bursting from the speakers, leaving him staggered at the development of the cold feeling circulating around his chest. To capture the indifference and disconnect of the modern man is to dwell inside a closed off space with the sounds of impurity fervently spiraling into the soul and pulling out its brainstem.

He remembers nothing of his life. He does not remember painting the walls neon or the way he boarded up in his bedroom. He does not remember the drawings, the hours of sex with some random woman only a few moons ago, or remember her grinding her nails into his back, as he released, wanting only to die. Each drug, each drink, each fuck was only a means of forgetting while remembering how these meaningless embraces once meant him lying in an ancient river bed with a dagger in his chest. In the complete darkness of his steamed over bathroom, he can stare and recall how it would be to lay with his heart exposed to a running river of plasma, its red cells healing his wounds, bringing him peace.

If his world was to end through violence, then this would be the only means. A nice round of sex with the music bursting through the floors, the wallpaper peeling, closing one's eyes to a silence never conceived of in biblical scripture coalescing into a symphony of slurps and gurgles. The quiet surrounding him as he dies is not glorious or heavenly, rather it is altogether haunting. It is a ghost returning to the southern plantations and waiting for the dew to settle upon Bermuda grasses. Grasses once disturbed by rifles firing over its amber waves, popping through the chests of southern gentlemen. In a time, large blue masses were storming through towns, leaving Yankee dollars on the eyelids of their confederate enemies and burning their Orange groves and mansions. He remembers his forefathers, he remembers Your mercy, he remembers their sins, and asks forgiveness.

Through his nostrils, he smells the violent stench of iron, the steam from the water wetting his lips. The lights above him flicker, the pulse of the drum in sync with his cold, charcoal colored heart. As its fluorescence reflects off the mirror, the hominid of the past flickers with the image of our protagonist. It is all too real, his brow moving up and down. He tries to remember something, anything, but he will not. He will not recall the days soon to pass with him lying against the wall snorting cocaine and masturbating for hours. He will not remiss and know that only a few days ago he had put together a bathroom atmosphere mp3 track, a song sent to him by a friend of a sister's best-friend's friend. He had it on repeat.

See, he will not remember and neither will you. You will not know the outcome, you will not know why our friend now sleeps with southern belles in vast plantations every night, or why he is standing before a mirror thinking of hominids and being killed while having sexual intercourse. I won't fucking tell you, because it is up to you. Not to figure it all out, but to remember that ultimately we do not know why we are here or what will happen as we fade off into a sea of darkness. Why it is our friends and family must die all in the name of nature, or why we come up with these Gods and these rules and these regulations, when ultimately we know nothing!

We are nothing but memories and resolutions and compromises and loves and sexes and powers and monies exchanged. We are only... only memory. In stones, in plaques, on rusty statuettes, we have our souls all waiting for the return of Atom bombs and Cold Wars. We want only to leave these silence filled planes in the afterlife, and finally destroy ourselves. You see, as the planet extinguishes, we are free to redeem ourselves and the prophesy is complete. But you will never know because we can only remember. We cannot tell the future, we can only move back to the past.

The shower stall shatters. The toilet is on its side and the bathroom is flooding. He stands naked staring into the mirror, the sounds of a pounding drum continuously looping over and over and over. His face is red, his eyes are blue, and his heart is black.

This is a man, this is a hominid, this is a middle aged man.

He stares into the mirror. The notes held long, the beeps increasing bpm, and the falsetto calling to him from another world, another place, and he cannot shake it. He cannot remember why he is now standing here, he does not know who this is standing in the shower next to him. Everything is now dark.

For many days, the sun will rise and fall. For many hours, the sounds of speculation will simmer in his uncomfortable space. All this time will pass, but our protagonist will still wait.

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