Crossroad Blues

He has to pick a door, has to pick, has to, has to-

One over two. Fifty-fifty. 

He shakes, trembles, body juddering. The world narrows, darkens, brightens.

(Wrong, wrong, wrong)

***

As always, it starts with a choice.

It’s midday, and the sun is cast directly overhead. He can feel its searing gaze bite into the exposed flesh at the back of his neck, the touch is bristly and hoarse, and when he shivers, it has nothing to do with the presence of the cold - there’s none, whatsoever, in fact - but more with the fear properly mangling up with the extremity of the climate. The shadows that the sun creates are elongated, with mockingly exaggerated proportions, and everything around him is unnervingly tangible. Particularly, he refers to the dark splotches of ink spinning around and around in his vision. It’s real. It’s not real. 

(Maybe it’s just him. Maybe not.)

He doesn’t know what to think anymore. God.

But there’s no God anymore. There’s just him, his shadow and the ensuing silence echoing around, the rhythm of which is almost seamless as it slips into the madness of his mind and it takes over. The white static burning merrily at the base of his skull is disorientating. It hurts, but he thinks that he might be getting used to the pain. He’s still not used to the colours though - vivid purples and bruised yellows and drained moonlight and dark red arterial sprays leached hollow by black - swirling around in his vision like a demented fog.

His head hurts. 

Up (or down?) 

Does it matter anymore?

(Flip a coin, the abyss whispers, as it coaxes and presses chilling kisses one by one across the sinews of his bone. Heads, you lose.)

Madness isn’t always sterile. There’s no straps to tie him down, no bars to hide the world away from him, nor is there anyone to notice the turmoil that’s been plaguing him so often, too often. Slaves meant to be lords, lords meant to be ladies and fools meant to be wise. Shakespeare knew what he was doing, that much was clear.

It’s frighteningly easy to slip into the skins of other people. Metaphorically speaking. He stumbles through the wet market, as a terrified child that is oh so lost (left corner, there’s a five-year old boy gazing back into the crowd, wide-eyed and teary, as his father consoles him.), accidentally meets the gaze of an old woman sitting upon the steps, and his brain rotates, feet turning to shambles as the phantom spread of old aches swallow the limbs whole, submerged into numbness, and he limps all through the day. The next day, he steals the compliance of a beggar. The day after, the resentment of a shopkeeper, bitter-hot and twitchy.

He is only able to take the darker aspects of humanity of his own. He swallows the anger, fear and pain (cold, cold, hot), but can never grasp the kinder sides of humanity. People often have a duality of nature, a sort of split personality in the branches of their individual behaviourisms. Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll-and-Hyde all at once. He’s seen people love and resent each other at the same time. Give a tip to an ailing cashier, but kick a stray cat in the next moment. 

(Love the sin, hate the sinner. Vice versa. )

He stands in the middle of a crossroads. There are a hundred paths laid out in front of him - train tracks and roads and railway lines and surging waves and the orbits of space, the circular rings of which tighten around his neck like a noose, but gives him no reprieve to step out into the release of darkness. The desperation is thick and cloying as it seeps through every pore. He feels sick, the flat of his throat clenches and clenches in retaliation, the distant pain throbbing on the inside, but somehow, he manages to keep everything inside. 

He sees everything, with an unseeing gaze. There’s too much and too little all at once. 

The pendulum swings in his mind’s eye. It leaves the confines of his skull with a quiet displacement of air, but the sound of it is like the screech of metal sliding against metal, his ears ring with the staccato of it - a detached arpeggio of notes dragged downwards the instrument with claws instead of delicate fingers. The pitched cadence leaves him shuddering, wavering. His heart beats as the metronome, trying to guide the song back into scale. 

The crossroads is as real as ever, but the visage that he views is still clinical in its precision.

The pendulum swings.

(It’s in his their head.)

Back-

-Forth

And 

Ever

On.

He sees the house in the distance, embraced in the darkness, like a ship with lights far out on the inky sea. Beautiful shafts of moonlight deadens him to the spot. He’s in a forest, decked out in hunting gear, a rifle slung across an arm. He holds it awkwardly, like a child would do, before the world melts, the timer ticks, and then his stance blends into a more expert one. He takes a deep breath.

He moves expertly through the woods, stepping carefully, gun raised at port. The change in posture is jarring, but he knows that the look on his face is discernible. It’s just the same that it’s always been. He reflects back, like always, taking the role of a mirror, never his own person, and breathes and assimilates to the mindset of a hunter, and becomes someone else entirely.

The woodland’s symphony is haunting. It sounds, overwhelmingly, sad. He listens carefully, eyes flashing with a sudden spark of life as he sees movement in the dense woods up ahead.

The stag comes into view, fearsome and majestic in a gruesome sort of way. The fur gleams black in the darkness, with the shine and shiver of individual drops of dew refracting back the faint light from the napalm stars above. The stag turns and looks right at him. He is paralysed.

He raises the rifle.

His finger tightens on the trigger.

There’s blood on the leaves. It smears across his fingers. He follows the trail of it, and pursues, faster, and more urgent. His heart pounds wildly against the ribs, but the sensation is distant. He isn’t sure he registers it at all. He breathes hard. There is the thick scent of copper in the air. His breath frosts in front of him. 

He sees a patch of blood, slick and alarmingly large. The stag lies nearby, collapsed and broken, bones crumbling in on each other and blood stilling to vapour in that dying heartbeat. The antlers break off and crumple to ash in his mouth. 

He staggers back, falling to the ground, the mud and snow and blood surging over, pouring down his throat and constricting his lungs with fluids, killing him as well in penance. Because that’s what always happens to monsters. They die at the end of the story.

***

They ask him to pick a door.

(It’s the wrong one.)