The Man in the Barrel (or Steel Drum)

{TW, Physical violence, gore, abuse, degradation, references to self-harm}

Day such and such, living, partly, in the captor’s, the bulking flesh, slice of space, under unknown amount of earth. A mattress, one which has the scent of the hole, and a hole to the right of the foot of it; four feet of space to sit up, a waterspout for gerbils, ferrets and other such domesticated rodents that hangs from the top left edge and protrudes from a small cavity in the ceiling, and a tray of slop that unfolds from the right wall three times a day.

Living, partly, in effluvia, one light, been on for days, a week, and maybe an amount of time practical for the plans of the flesh klepto or collector to satisfy its needs, once again be suffocated and wake up back, please be back. There is only a suggestion of night, a mute dull mentality signals me for sleep. Sleep entailed by the lucid image of a pulsing mass, tectonic movement overhead that throbs and shifts, sex from the devil, the inclosing cosmos fetishizing its own existential lack of being. Shivering. Late nights, or other, I look outside at the rusted steel door, or metal plate that once maybe had the posited application of a door, at the chosen foot of the mattress with four grates in the center, viewing a crouching hallway, appearing abandoned almost, placed between two floors, I’m at the end of but not staring down, and a barrel which sits across the hall – one could also refer to it as a steel drum.

Corrupted by time with razored lips.

I can’t confirm, nor proclaim whether my material rapes, dwelling with longevity, have finally corroded all which once opined rationally, but the sanguine trail that pooled at the lip of the barrel or steel drum and slid down the side and left a path following along the viewable half hallway has left me thinking the flesh klepto stations inside the barrel/steel drum most nights or days or sick urges give the compulsion to force one’s body into the barrel randomly; I’m living, partly, mostly staring at the barrel through the grates waiting for a figure that matches the one which I first felt - suffocating arms, grope and biting me, almost inhuman to touch, except for the limbs that restrain; bumps of tumorous skin thicken the scrawny felt silhouette - to appear out of, arise or enter.

I hear its breath, I swear, and I imagine the air wisping out of the crooked, spacious and almost interlocking teeth. The barrel, for brevity because that is what it is to me, feels full sometimes and empty others. It stays there, not looking, but listening to itself, to me devouring the slop or drinking the ever-full drips of water, or the scratching I’ve begun on the walls – bled and stopped after nails gave way before the wall.

The barrels full, always full, or always empty I fear, and I’ve truly lost ways of which to return to normalcy. If not, the barrel acts or is employed as some regressed pre-oral psychosexual stage; an in-utero comfort embellished with tetanus. I think there is hair, almost draped, but bunched up out of the barrel like a weight is leaning and forcing it up, and over being some consequence. Maybe it’s shifting, less is draping.  

The other day, maybe…

The other day I focused on myself, unwillingly, where my mind became singular, an apparatus of meat and blood and electrical impulses which is whole, the first time it felt whole – like an independent floating consciousness of itself – where if I was to crack my skull on the cement wall no capillaries will spill and what is found inside would be nothing, yet still I will think. I would continue to hold a sense of consciousness and perception, but there are no gaps in the singular entity, highlighting a true blink – thought as something which appears into existence and will cease. The complete nothing like there never was. Could a false feeling of reality highlight the true reality?

The hair is draping more studiously, like the prim god, the flesh klepto’s ego, punctuated its own control, its own dominance, and my own fragility.

I’ve tried starving myself and woke up full.

Currently – all-encompassing and can’t be wrong (or maybe I’m brought to a place with no current or surrounding events) – the barrel is always full, not a flicker of weight has left, not a balance has shifted, nor a glimpse at validity of its fullness – the now combed hair only glistens under the barrels rim shadow; streaks of a lesser dark, a shape not fully interpreted. It’s in there, like a mold of whatever form the barrel desires, cocooning comfort in a habitat indifferent to your needs, with breathing restricted to a wheeze of external pressures on the flesh klepto’s diaphragm… probably. If reason hasn’t left and my own discovered singular consciousness is not deceiving me, then the barrel is full, but I can’t help but worry.

How time ticks, plentiful in our own reckless abandon, cutting short the intrepid. Loneliness sets in within the first week, maybe days, possibly hours, and I feel observed enough to sustain, but observed by a phantom, a barrel. The more horrifying possibility is that of true abandonment, left in the dark, or dull light, to entertain myself within a careless space, but the way the weight of the barrel stares, insisting on the space, brings forth its profound eyes. Possibly, eyes which gain pleasure from my sense of abandonment, or has the mutual feeling of also being observed, gaining its own hermit-esque solace in the company of having eyes on it, eyes which it created to be lesser than it; eyes which marvel at the suggestion of its existence allowing the theorization of it, like a pleasurable stimulus, narcissistically keen on its own image. I could also be incidental to the flesh klepto, a prize, of which I occupy its sickening terrarium, one not much different from others in its collection.

But if not, if the barrel or steel drum is empty, I am terrified to think the flesh klepto walks, collects, abandons; a different kind of incidental and unfeeling – so unfeeling that its connection to the world is questioned – never intending but always taking, like me, now stuck in this slice of life, discarded, imagining a presence. I sense a presence, there must be a presence. Something to direct my banal rage.

I don’t feel sick, hungry or dying, but the end is coming soon. When this is all over, the barrel should be full. No, it must be full.

The barrel is full. The barrel is full. The barrel is full.