Insipid

This is where the judges are taken.

For now.

Tied.

Muffled.

Their breath is shallow.

Temporary…

If at all.

Regardless, all of them have an expiration.

More often than not…Slowly.

In the grime and timeless hours of the city, the roads cross like shadowy vapors in the cataclysm of morning traffic.

When the homeless and the drunks float, wash up in alleyways and orphaned parking lots, and felines move forward bony and lean, forbidding perimeters etched about in shadows without any particular order.

The artist paints and creates without forgiveness.

Moss pasted stones and conspicuous passageways.  

Flickering bollards refract a gothic harp of hidden cellar doors to which their past judgments shall be prosecuted with unrelenting torture.

Aged brick walls are jagged and plummed by harsh weather.  

Thin dark trees, through forged iron bars, collect the metropolis of the dead.

The viewers, readers, watchers, and blind judges lack the qualified judgment capacity.

Slanted architecture, bizarre and oblique, cross-shaped stones whose names grow pale and dull with years.

Through worn weeds, there are coiled vines by which the artist has blended their flesh as an oily top coat of crimson stains matching their unforgivable transgressions.

Dark threads connect pole-by-pull with the constellations like a tightly webbed kite string.

Shattered and hollow bottles mingled with adolescent toys.

This is the circus of the damned.

And this time, the artist becomes their judge.

***

Reed wakes on the toilet with his pants down. Substance more than the revolving tick of the bent tin hands circulates in constant revolution.

Something out of the bathroom mirrors with drifting hooks pass through the doors. 

It startles Reed to consciousness like a vivid moonlit miasma.  

A faculty greater than time or the consistent power of entropy forces him to persist.

Reed discovers himself alone with the remnants unforgotten of the illustrious dead.  

The Art.

Surrounding expressions and applications of creative endeavors appreciated or despised by watchers who have no clue what meaning lies behind the once-living creators.

The eyes watch Reed's confusion as he pulls on doors and fails to unlock exits from his rusty silver key ring.  

A mysterious malediction appears to have him entrapped due to a belated or forgotten gap in time.

At twilight, he hears things he has never heard during the day.  

Perhaps the outpouring of sewage emission from the waste treatment plant.

Sloshing, gargling substance reverberating from the pipes constructed beneath the bridge's underbelly neighboring the museum courtyard.  

The other sounds are quite familiar.

Traffic.

An echoing harmonic.

The hum of tires. 

Faint street lights make the windows glow beyond the well-manicured sage maples.

Tinted boundaries between shadows and light meld into a vibrant, iridescent emerald green.

Reed stands with a casual look of confusion in the corpuscular solitude. 

The museum is closed. 

It has been closed for quite some time.

***

Reed wakes in the bathroom under flickering iridescent lights, pinging and buzzing, with no recollection of how or why his security shift did not end in the usual manner.  

A tipping point of worry and panic commences with a shock of anxiety induced by a crescendo of alien sounds.  

A clang of brass, perhaps steel.

Motionless frames are no longer idle but quivering and rattling over conventionally soundless brick backdrops.

"Hello?"

There is no reply or prospect of human speech.  

Surpassing the growing clamor of unrecognizable chaos, there is an echo that Reed cannot find with the faint wormhole emitted from his standard issue rechargeable LED mag light.  

"Hello?"

Reed points the tapered gleam toward the frozen metallic escalator.

Muffled squeals and cries of pain sound from a ledge of darkness. 

***

The beast unleashes a colicky cry from the abyss.  

It’s a galloping stag with blood dripping from horns. 

It moves closer and closer with eagerness.

Black-winged finches flutter to the museum rafters and twitch, cluck, and chitter uncertainly.  

Reed's hands tremble when the maglight catches the chimes and wailing groans from the crowd of beasts above.  

Old paint on worn artifacts framed and preserved as god-like relics shatter and break.

The shrapnel of worshipped artwork flung through the air in plumes of chromatic dust.

Reed stops observing.

Something screams.

"You should not be here!"

Reed runs.

***

The artist lectures before a curious crowd of learners and observers—writers and critics, and even critics of writers.

***

Does the devil ever sleep? How can malevolence exist and wake so soundlessly? What does man truly strive to capture in his pursuit to create? Pain? Pleasure? Truth? Even parasites bellow to entities unable to observe. To record the most minute details of creation is true art. Stop! Dammit, all of you! You know nothing! You are pathetic and disgusting. Art is not a reflection that makes you feel a certain way you want to feel when you observe. You have become lazy, selfish, and complacent. You seek pleasure or escape from the inescapable. There will always be pain. Suffering. Insects work in the roots of a cactus plant, dried up like a cool green prune at the edge of the city—something so small that it's invisible to the naked eye. The birth pangs of a creature so small but shall soon coil up into something segmented and black from the darkest recesses of the earth. As it slips inside, the aphid cannot articulate the agony. In its dying moments, it attempts to scurry up the stem of the cactus and take refuge in one of its fleshy leaves. It gathers company with an ant feeding on the honey aphids produce. Their bent antennae touch momentarily. Whatever small beast possesses, the aphid burrows grotesquely into the ant—an action so natural and insignificant. Smoke bellows in the cold from the warehouse chimneys, and the aphid erupts with a minuscule and pressurized hiss. The ant scatters to its hill.

And you ask me to talk about the one left overnight? In a museum of art? Why? To entertain you idiots who know nothing of the composition or form by which true art is made? You could not handle a single night! Art is Flesh, bone, life decaying unto death. Everywhere. Rarely does one of them live.

***

The artist walks casually in front of the beasts. 

Eyes gleaming, constructed from shattered glass. The face morphs from fear to fear, blurring and shaking, chipped and cracked into burst images of gouged stone.  

The artist edges forward through the air, covered in blood dripping from a furry mane of torn muscle and splintered marrow.  

He grabs a finch with shattered nails and tears it limb by limb, consuming the dark essence and tugging the head with the spine attached.

Reed's body trembles as the museum walls crack and topple in the darkness. 

Jagged ledges crash, and massive plates of cobalt infrastructure separate like gray stitches bursting at the seams.  

Slate drops below.

There are dull echoes with harrowing thunder. 

Crimson light spills through shale walls.  

"Oh, God."

Great red claw marks expand and dilate as sharp legs poke through neon lava cross-sections of growing light.  

Reed shrieks at the sight of the creatures scurrying down a great wall. 

His skull fills with blood, and his eyes bulge.  

The artist hungers.

The artist dismembers and persists in consuming flesh from the weaker ones.

“Why… are… you… doing this?”

***

Does God ever sleep? Do you honestly believe that goodness is there? The same way evil is? What has your life captured? Pain? Pleasure? Truth? The artist had a father. The father was a preacher who could not stop drinking. The artist’s father was beaten so badly that he carried that very pain for the artist to carry. It stops at a certain point because as time passes, those who read or observe the art just want to feel okay. I understand your laziness. I understand why you have not seen it. Not once. Do you honestly believe everything you have witnessed is fiction? A prompt? Agenre? The artist was birthed by a woman who attempted to abort him several times. Why would mommy want a child as the oldest of six? Mommy cleaned up the brains of her daddy next door to the abusive third mommy who replaced the original mommy six different times. And, her daddy, an alcoholic made it known his life was never a life worth living. An artist learns how to paint when the abused daddy believes God might still be awake. Never aborted. Poor mommy, she must have been so hurt to try and drown her own child… how can we blame her? She cleaned Daddy’s brains up. You could never have handled a single night! Art is Flesh, bone, life decaying unto death. Everywhere. Rarely does one of them live.

***

Such a Devil Among Them.

That Damn Preacher.

Who is The Star of Our Show?

Why couldn’t they ever Just Let Me Go?

My whole life has been a Nadir.

A Relic of sorts.

You’d never understand the Cost of Madness.

***

Reed seeks some reason from the demonic anarchy but receives a tormenting laugh hovering closely behind him.

The voice probes his mind with penetrating binormal echoes stinging the cochlea of his ears.

"Fantasy, my child! All of this is impossible. Improbable…”

The artist lets the head and torso of another drop to the ground. 

The foul odor of gore and death circulates like a wretched methane gas that begins to burn Reed's mortal flesh.

Reed looks up into a void of starless dark with an expression of horrified unbelief. 

Cryptic lightning shoots a rainy blip, stark and blue, over the ground.

His dermis begins to boil and pop. 

His skin sags, oozes, and melts like dripping wax.

The artist oscillates before him, a floating apparition of macabre terror swelling dark gore over an open valley of nothingness. 

Jutting trees begin to rear dimly in flashes of lightning.  

"It's almost over, Reed! Goddammit, Reed! Do you see by now? Reed!? See!?”

A distant thunder explodes.  

“Every line. Each stroke. The art you’ve observed with passive apathy…do you now see?"

Wind splatters darkly hued magenta lightly over his face.  

Reed whispers.

Choking on vinaigrette plasma,

“I… see… nothing… any… longer…”

***

Insipid.

***

The external layers of Reed's concententrial tissue split.

The vascular uvea begins to ooze before the deconstruction of the conciliatory body and choroid, 

Reed's eyes explode, and he slips on the discarded slime, only to immediately fall and crush his occipital bone.

"My child, this is the first truth you have admitted to," says the artist.

All the creatures merge into one another, becoming giant beasts of indescribable dimension. 

Pulsating sacks swell with a circuity of blue and green veins and slimy gouts of red and yellow mucous gush.

Drip, drip, drip.  

There is no light, and Reed collapses on a field of flesh and bone. 

A raw pool of human remains glitter within a sloppy strobe flashing in synchronization with the final beat of his broken heart. 

Gory rags of meat drizzle over his limp body.  

***

The morning opens up, clear and cloudless.  

Reed inhales.

The linoleum beneath him feels strange and brittle, as if he were balancing on the back of a crusted papillary layer of frangible skin.  

Reed's throat burns, and his bones feel brittle as if they belong to someone much older than himself.  

The sun blossoms from a ball of glare into a large pearl.

The windows consume all light, dissipating it like a magnifying glass searing an ant.

As it burns brighter, Reed becomes more thirsty and hungry. A pain burns up and down him and across his belly.  

He thinks of the words.

"Art? Prompt? Fantasy? Truth?"

He does not know why, but he begins to vomit.

***

This is where the judges are taken.

For now.

Tied.

Muffled.

Their breath is shallow.

Temporary…

If at all.