The Infinitely Empty Space

CW: Gore, body horror, mental health

A man of a middling age knelt by a pond. He hadn’t seen a decent drink of water in two days, having spent a small but marked portion of that time lying prone in the muck and gravel and sucking up even the smallest of reservoirs there was an earthly basin to hold. He knelt horrifically in his desperation, as any man would, his body contorted and crooked and waned like the curl of a hardened spider. He drank with his hands, and after a flurry of motion, caught a glimpse of his reflection and shuddered. For a moment, he was stuck there in the grip of his own double-edged gaze into that little pond. Dirt from the forest stuck to him, gathering in spotted piles on his cheeks and the skin of his ankles so thickly it seemed there may be nothing underneath. The skin around his eyelids was smeared and grey and acted as an eyeshadow in accentuating his eyes, which were red and wretched and looked as though their only wish was to escape the flesh and bone that contained them.

His face was still. He plunged his head as low as his weakened frame could hold it and broke the water’s surface, and the noise of this place, already a razor’s cut from from silent, was muffled all the more, his likeness in the face of the pond shattered out of existence as if it was to join the evaporating water rising into the air around him. He closed his eyes and drank until he could no longer. He flung his head back and went toppling into the grass where he lay facing the sky, the dirt dripping down from his face to reveal him, the water brown and rippling. The sun was only half-up, and it was hot. He laid there and let the water and sweat drip off of him, and he felt less and less. Finally, he was comfortably blank, the temperature as meaningless to him as each leaf that hung above him, for he had steeled himself once again against the terror of his own humanity, and his mind was as it tended to be: a slave to his empty desires — a quiet and obedient machine.

He sat and looked over the forest that stretched wide around him. His right hand traced the outline of a knife he’d taken from a dead man’s belt. The little food he had at the bottle-neck of his journey having run out, his only two possessions in the world were his desecrated outfit that was absent from the waist up, and the knife, which was measly and cheaply-made with a handle of sickly, yellow plastic. With nothing left to muster, he lied down so his face was in the shade of a hulking sugar maple tree and fell asleep.

When he awoke the sun was squarely above him, and the whole of him was lined with sweat. It dripped down his pointed, mean brow to the edge of his lips so it merged with his saliva, and he tasted the electrolytes his body was chasing out. His eyes swirled around in his head and landed on a couple of deer that were grazing behind the pale bark and leaves that were the color of a dark moss across the pond. They had yet to notice him.

The man looked upon them unromantically for several minutes until they had grazed out of sight, never having looked him in the face. He looked at the sun, which was like a great, furious clock rotating above him. If he did not move, he would surely die. He kept gazing out at this or that passing animal, squirrels and birds and rodents that showed themselves only in the rustling of leaves, all things large and small that felt no fear at the sight of him if they even saw him at all. The man wondered for a moment if perhaps he wanted to die. There are several shades of misery, and his was one which did not long for death, for there was not a thing he wanted more than another, and no passion left in him for the making of joy or disdain or anything of the sort. This was a man who was entirely stripped, the soil of his soul as barren and lifeless as the surface of the moon.

The man crawled to the edge of the pond and drank more before he stood and began to walk. He had no map and no compass and little understanding of the protocols of the cosmos. His course was a simple one, which took him towards the morning sun in the East.

He went another two days and two nights having eaten nothing. Finally, his hunger was pulling at him so strongly he resorted to eating grass and the colorful petals of flowers like an unsupervised dog. It was a lush place, and somehow, he had come across not a single wild fruit ripe for his taking. He clutched the knife as he trudged and looked for any animal he might be able to corral. His body would be of little use if there were to be a chase. Squirrels and birds looked down at him mockingly from the treetops, but nothing big or small presented itself for his taking. Within an hour, he had stopped looking altogether.

On what was his fifth morning in the forest, he sat by the base of a ponderosa pine and began peeling the bark, which he chewed with a careful focus. It was not a timely process. He reached for the knife, and it was not there.

His hunger stabbed at him, the pain sharpening. Half an hour passed, and he began to move quickly, his hands grabbing ruthlessly at the bark, ripping his way to the softer tissues beneath and popping little pieces into his mouth. They tasted blank. He became frantic, his head whipping from side-to-side as if there may be somebody nearby intending to stop him. He threw bark and cambium into his mouth without discrimination and spotted his gums and palate with little lacerations. The taste of iron eclipsed that of the raw pine. The skin of his fingertips had been shredded by the desperate friction that was not just the tearing of bark, but the grasping of his very existence, which was droll and putrid but not something he could bear to let slip away.

The crazed stupor left him drained before long, and the man again went to sleep in the grass where he lay. When he woke, the tips of his fingers were adhered loosely to his shirt. He peeled them off, each strip of clotted blood choosing between skin or cotton as fate directed like the breaking of a wishbone. He wiped his face and stood and was crazed still. He began to move, stepping unevenly and stumbling like a drunkard, though any common drunk had more than him, which was the promise of impending sobriety. He steadied himself on trees and on the dirt with his arms that felt like corroded copper rods.

He walked for some hours more, and he was unafraid of death — unafraid of the horrors it seemed life would surely bring him. He was hardly a man at all. There was no reason left to guide him, and he kept moving as the Earth spun and the firmament dissolved the sun into the horizon and pinned a million stars above him, and he did not so much as tilt his head upwards or with purpose in any direction, for the stars were to him like flies, the sky and universe behind them like cork on a pale wall.

Before long, the thick canopy of the forest sealed itself shut again, and the stars vanished behind it. The man began to yell.

“I deserve it!” He had not spoken in well over a week. His voice was a death rattle and tasted sour as it moved over his tongue. “I deserve it all!”

He moved between trees in the darkness, clinging to them, his eyes closed and his hands bleeding again. He continued to speak to the forest in lieu of all the gods that had long ago forsaken him, though he was growing weaker, and his voice was like a broken whisper, as though he were afraid to be heard by even the smallest of creatures.

“I never killed anyone out of rage or envy. I never meant to kill anyone at all.”

He coughed and felt mucus on his arm and wiped it into his pants, his eyes like stones, having all but disconnected from the core of him.

“I wish I could bring her back. I wish I could. I wish I could undo it all. This never was the life I meant to live. Never was, I swear. I drink because I want to die. Because the life you gave me was only worth covering up. It was the only way I could live at all!”

It was several hours into the night. His legs were all but giving out. He fell to his knees first and then dropped entirely to the ground, and the grass and dirt against him felt as cold and hard as porcelain.

He turned to his back and began slapping himself in the face with what little force he could generate from such a position, blood and saliva mixing about on his face and on the floor of the forest. He began to yell again.

“A little girl and her father! A little girl and her father! They should have lived in place of me! If I believed in God or Satan I would pray every day to give my life for theirs, but it’s useless! There’s no use in praying! No one to hear me beg! No one to set things right!”

He lay there breathing deeply. He crawled to his knees and looked up into the dark canopy that covered the sky like a blanket over a window. His mind, perhaps jarred into place by the flurry of sharp pain, was working once more, and his sins, too numerous to count, washed over him, the weight of them crashing into his meager form with the force of a meteorite which had passed through millions of miles of space and burning orbs and each floating ball of minerals in its path to eviscerate the man with a crushing totality it seemed could only be divine in nature.

“I’m gone!” he yelled, his face like a cherry and glowing in the darkness. “You’ve killed me. Now let me die! Let me die! You…” He went into a coughing fit that lasted only a few seconds but still was enough to exhaust him. Suddenly, he had a terrible headache. He held his eyes as tightly shut as he could squeeze them and pushed into the sides of his head with his blackened palms. After a few minutes, he continued at a whisper.

“You’ve burned me up time and time again.” He spit without moving his head. “Everything I could have been, everything that took part in the making of me… it’s burnt into nothing. I am nothing…”

The man opened his eyes and looked again towards the sky. “Let me become it.”

He cried and wailed tremendously. He felt pain everywhere, and his chest was heavy, and he gasped for air in a panic for a few moments before he settled and the fear left him. He finally stood but remained in his despair. But through the avalanche of regret he was encased within there was a glimmering realization that shone through like the strips of moonlight darting through the gaps in the canopy, which were impossibly thin — and which he finally took note.

His mind was rinsed of the algae of his ugly life that had all this time been layered between him and the through-line of the universe, which meant to touch upon every living thing that was not cruelly divided from it by vice or terror or the unchecked tendrils of man. And in an instant, the man was once again afraid to die.

Awestruck and frozen, he stopped crying and could breathe once again. He swung his head loosely to each side and surveyed the dark forest as if he were seeing it for the first time.

It was true that he committed crimes of reckless negligence for which he was tried and convicted and loaded onto the plane that brought him, incidentally, to die in the forest. It was true that his life was an oozing sore. But there he stood as the sun came up to gaze upon him through a hallway of brush and leaves, a prisoner there in the wilderness, a fiend, an absent son and brother, a sad berserker, a twisted and puny semblance of what mankind had to offer, a decorated dispenser and keeper of great suffering, and he was perhaps the first person in that quiet country the light touched upon.

There was a great hill before him that had been hidden by the darkness and foliage, and at the top of the hill, he could see through the waving leaves what was unmistakably the roof of a cabin. He adjusted himself and could make out the chimney of crudely-placed concrete brick. The man ran towards it, climbing the hill like an animal, his eyes wide, veins popping from his face and forearms. He was working with everything he had to keep his body from crumbling against the damp, green slope.

When he reached the cabin, he fell against the aching wood of the door. It gave way, and he was inside. It was decorated extensively with trophies and personal treasures and framed portraits hung with great care on each wall around him. There were couches and love-seats enough for ten people in a half-circle around the fireplace. He struggled to his feet against an end table by the door and it swayed under his weight and sent crashing to the floor a glass vase that held a dried bouquet, the flowers dead but still flaunting their colors, which were not as they once were but still were piercing in the darkness of that room. He stood and was taken by a powerful stench that brought his arm snapping over his nose. There was a bed to his right, and there were two forms upon it that were clear to see even in the dim light of the morning, one much smaller and tucked neatly into the other like a tangerine in an oblong dish.

They were stiff and blue but not one bit decomposed. They were a man and a child. A little girl of perhaps 8 or 9. He saw the state of the dead man and spun his head around on his neck to take in the whole scene. There was a trail of blood leading from the door to the bed. There was more that had leaked from the man onto the bed and floor, staining all of it like the dried pulp of a fruit.

An animal had gotten to him. There was a hole in his back almost big enough to step into. The man lifted the blanket cautiously and further investigated it, the nerves in his face quivering outside of his volition like grains of sand being thrashed about by the wind.

He turned away from them and vomited a yellow bile onto the floor. There was nothing in him left to expel, but his mutinous body, at the pinnacle of its suffering, could no longer be commanded by the soul, or by whatever such a man would call it, so disconnected from any godly creator or process.

He was a dripping mess. His sinuses were filled with snot and bile and blood, but it was nothing the overwhelming stench of the cabin could not penetrate. He rolled around on the floor, cold and bleeding and quivering. He came to his knees and became violent, thrashing about, blinded by his own fluids, tossing himself pointlessly about in an anger directed at the whole of the world for this latest act of cruelty.

At the apex of his flailing, he jerked himself like a doll into the kitchen, its laminate counter tops barren besides the web of a spider. He tried to stand and cut his foot on a piece of the broken vase, and he slid headfirst into the wood of the cabinets, which were thin and broke easily. And inside there were bags of oats, soups, canned corns and beans and carrots, granola, chocolate, jams and jellies and more, which came pouring out of the like candy from a pinata and smashed onto the floor.

The man looked at his feet, at the oats which now covered his boots almost to the laces, his anger burning out like a star and leaving a blunted sorrow in its wake. His abdomen moved in and out hurriedly with his breath in huge motions. He gasped as if he were crying, but his eyes had no moisture left to give. A few minutes passed like this before he returned to throwing his head into the wood, which was splintered and abrasive and left him with fresh cuts along the sides of his head and face.

When he could no longer bear to continue, he dropped his head onto the counter top. He caught briefly his warped reflection in the faucet of the sink, and he was trembling, and he was hideous, and he did not recognize the man he saw, but he did not close his eyes, and after several minutes, he stopped trembling, stopped gasping, and was breathing steadily again. Then, he knelt to the floor and began to eat.