BIRTH

TW: gore, sexual abuse

‘It’s a loop. It’s a loop. It’s a loop.’

She wakes in the dark. Though not so much as wake as come to consciousness. Funny how that works. The idea of you not waking up but rather coming to. Absolute nothingness surrounds her. She cannot see anything, not even her own body. But rather she can feel it - can flex her arms and twist her legs. The surface she is on seems to be . . . something. Something otherworldly. 

(otherworldly? huh, funny word)

Who said that? 

Wait am I speaking?

She could see the words floating in front of her eyes, the darkness around her pulsing, morphing into something the shape of the words. But there is no sound in the darkness. No light. So, she is not entirely sure how she knows the words are there but she is certain it is there. To be fair she doesn't even know how she knows that she is a she. She has no frame of reference. She doesn't even know what being ‘she’ means. She is just sure that she exists. A thoughtless void bound for nowhere. 

(our little girl)

(you are beautiful)

She is . . . beautiful? That somehow makes her feel something at her core. Some form of light inside her. And that . . . is light bubbling up from inside her. The light sparks, brightens, takes on the shape of a star as the words 

(‘beautiful’, ‘our princess’, ‘you are what we have been waiting for’)

form and eddy, coalescing into a form of hexagon made of light energy, floating in a sea of darkness. All for her. All because of her. 

She is . . . important. Whoever she is, whatever she is. To those words that are being born in the vortex - she is needed by the creator of those words. Because even if she doesn’t know the meaning behind, well, anything, really, she does know one undeniable truth: for a thing to exist, it has to make meaning to its creator. 

And she, whatever, whoever, wherever. She makes meaning happen to these people. She is . . .

(you are loved, so, so much, baby girl)

And like this time passes. Moments tagged onto one another. Aligned alongside each other. Moments of levity, moments of joy. And there are moments that are not of joy, too. Moments when something seems to affect her creator in a bad way. In a sad way. She does not particularly care for those moments. She does not like seeing the people who make up her world be sad. She feels so helpless (that’s another word she learned: helpless - she’s not quite sure she is supposed to know what that means yet but nevertheless when she sees her creator suffering, when the words morph into ones of pain, of regret, that is exactly what she feels, so helpless.) 

In the beginning when those moments used to happen it was usually accompanied by a streak of red lightning that would illuminate the dark. A contrast, a negative image that by itself instills a horror of wrongness unto her. Red in the dark stands out like a beacon for all unbecoming, unsavory acts that her creators always seem to worry she would fall pray to in what they call a

(‘a cruel world out there, I am really worried about her, and she is not even here yet’)

Though she tends to pay not much heed to those words, to those . . . concerns? yes, concerns that her creators seem to levy unto her. After all, she has come to learn, as long as they are there nothing can harm her. For they are the All Powerful Creator. She belongs to them. She is a part of them, here in this dark disquiet, as time passes, the moments stretched out in thinly veiled words and night shrouded redness. 

And so she lets those moments pass, for they always do. Just one more planar existence stacked upon an array of existences. All of them are real. All of them are hers. Just as she belongs to all those existences. And for now she is content. She is the focal point, and existence revolves around her. 

Here, in the dark. 

<SHE IS READY/COMPLETED/UNLEASHED>

She does not know exactly what wakes her this time. The darkness around her is just as it always was: dark. Empty. Devoid of anything but her and her creations. Her words and her existences. She looks (glances/feels/morphs) around, trying to pinpoint the source of disturbance that had caught her attention. At this point in her existence she has grown quite accustomed to the dark. Have created ingenious ways of navigating through it. Following directions that only she knows. Her own little world, tailored to her likings. 

But nothing seems out of the ordinary. All things seem to be orderly, just as it had been before she was rudely disturbed by that pinprick of awareness. It was a sharp, singular point of contact, at the base of her skull. Well, everything seems to be fine. Okay, then. Time to head back.

She (turns/walks/levitates) around.

The light hits her like the bullet of a bolt action rifle shot at a point blank range. 

After being (born/founded/initiated) in the dark, the concept of light being faded words against an ebony backdrop, this light intensity almost blinds her. She closes her eyes shut tight. Squinting, squinting, squinting against the sharp glare of the fluorescent bulb. It is a singular point of contact somewhere up above her that is the bane of her existence right now. And so she does the only thing she can think of doing. She reaches up, 

and she twists the light bulb out.

A typewriter? sound echoes around her, within her. Flashes form against the closed eyelids. There, and then gone. 

Once it is a bit darker again does she dare open her eyes. And almost wished she hadn’t.

<THE LIGHT IS ACCEPTED/INITIATED/TAKEN>

A horror scene surrounds her: lit up by red, sober lights, there are five bodies spread out in a pentagon. They lay face up. Naked. Marks and swirls surround their bodies - cut ups so deep that their inner organs spill out of the cuts like flowers growing in between layers of concrete. The red lights accentuate the darker shade of blood that has been used to draw the pentagonal shape. And in the middle of the pentagon lies an object. 

Drawn by abject curiosity and an unbidden urge to not look at the lifeless bodies further 

(voices rang in her head - ‘another war, another wave of killing’, ‘so many dead children’, ‘so unnecessary, these acts of violence’ ‘they would be back’, ‘again, again, again’)

she makes her way, carefully avoiding spilt blood and hastily chopped body pieces (the five bodies seem to have been set in a particular form, with the five heads at the five axial points and the rest of the parts decorating the various connecting lines to and from those heads, their lifeless eyes faced inwards, towards the central object), and finally reaches the center. 

It is an angular object, with some pipes crisscrossing muscular tissue. And . . . was the object pulsating? Like her darkness (her darkness?) used to pulsate. It was a hypnotic rhythm. A sort of 

lub dub lub dub

in a never ending crescendo. She doesn’t want to but she still makes herself look around. No, there seems to be only this one object in the vicinity. All the other body parts have more than one part but this object seems to be the only one of its kind, here, in this Red Room of Death. 

The hypnotic rhythm seems to call out to her. She extends a hand, slowly, cautiously. Unsure but wanting to know (dying to know) what that object is. Maybe if she can feel its texture, feel the rhythm vibrate against her bones -

 The typewriter sound echoes around her. Within her. Pulses of light, stretching, contracting. There and then gone. 

The sound of the rain almost drowns out the shout. She jerks upright, hand drawing against empty air where previously the object resided. The winds howl an angry echo, the rain a torrential downpour that seems hellbent on washing away everything along with it. A sliver of a blood moon peaks from between the dark clouds, illuminating the scene before her, like a lightbulb to light up the things that take place in the shadows. The things her darkness hid from her, all this time.

She sees the blood again. See the bodies again. But this time, these bodies are distinguishable. Five of them in total. Laid out in the shape of a pentagon. Two of them are naked, bits of blood and matter caked in between their feet, stark bright against a dangling object. Out of the other three, one is lying face up, the middle of their body hollowed out. An empty carcass soon to be erased out of existence as the carrion comes to feast upon the discarded left behind. 

And the other two are lying on top of one another. One of those two is like the other four, with the dangling piece in between their legs. Whilst the one beneath them . . . 

It is a she. And she knows it is a she because she looks just like her. Her darkness taken shape. She was lying face up, one hand broken, discarded beyond her head. The other was holding a sharp object that is currently lodged into the side of the person lying above her. Her legs are askew, taken out the shape that they were originally supposed to be. Ostensibly to make space for the person above her in between those legs. An echo, a dark disquiet flashes before her eyes. 

Suddenly, the person above her is moving against her. But not in a way that she seems to want them to. 

Stop!

The word is foreign. The word is not a word but a sighed echo out of her mouth? out of her being, of that center core of light that always seems to spark inside her, ever since she gained consciousness. 

Stop! You are hurting her. She doesn't want you to do that.

She is writhing beneath the person, trying to shrug them off her. But all is for naught. Her person is dead, one of the other three. Gutted out like fish out of a barrel after those other two had died. Carved out bit by bit as some sort of sick amusement by this person now moving above her. Against her lying on the ground. Helpless. She could not help her person when they were gutting out the stomach/meat/bones; for a sharp, sudden pain had erupted across the lower abdomen at that moment.

(‘no, no you cannot come now, not now, god, please, please, not now’, ‘no, don’t, she’s pregnant, you’ll harm the child, fuck me instead, punish me however you want but please let her go’, ‘oh, tom, tom, tom, my dear child, you do not seem to understand that the consequences of our actions always, always are a ripple effect, you should have thought of that before you decided to not give me back what is rightfully mine, and so now I have come to take it, tom, i’ve come to make amends, tom, for your actions, i am really truly sorry it had to come to this’)

The silhouette played against the horror story taking place in front of her. She (her creator) cried out in pain as the person above her moved in a grotesque, horrifying way. They also shouted but their shout was different, was one of want and need and taking. And they did not stop taking. The blood was a metaphor in the rain slicked world as the witch hour drew to a zenith of unbridled pleasure and red-drenched amusement, backdropped by the tears glistening on her face as she laid there. Her face was drenched in pain, in regret. And she could feel it, feel that regret. Feel it like it was her regret, like it was her pain. 

Now she truly understood the significance of the word: helpless.

(‘i am sorry my child, there was no other way, know that you are the greatest thing we have ever done in our life, and if life gave me another chance, even knowing the ending, i would not have it any other way’)

The words floated around her. The rain and the wind made sure of it. 

Her creator, with her last breath, gave a mighty push, and as the fresh sound of pain cleaved the night in two, she raised her unbroken hand and thrust the mighty object of destruction, bringing the night to its frightful crescendo.

The sound of the typewriter echoed around her. Within her. Pulses of light, stretching, contracting. There and then gone.

‘I love you, my little girl.’

The darkness collapsed unto itself, and then she was gone, gone, gone. 

The sound of a child crying was echoed by the heaven and hell above and below, echoing in the distant mountains as the Earth trembled by the act of violence perpetrated in its name, on its bosom. 

'this world is a wasteland' 'don't let me go'

To escape the horror story titled Birth a great sacrifice is demanded from the hero of the story. To bring the song to its end. 

<SHE IS OUT/BORN/DIED>

THE END