Fluppies

Things were burning everywhere outside. I took this as an opportunity to get reacquainted with my body. It started with yoga, some kundalini, humming. Quickly it deteriorated into meditating over the burn of gin in my solar plexus. The thing about your anatomy is that you can turn anything into an experiment. It all ends up coming out in the wash anyway.

I played video games. I was unable to stop myself tensing up whenever shots tore through my virtual body. My avatar would let out a truncated garble when the shots were lethal. My real body jerked as if pulled by strings.

***

It’s not dark enough anymore. The children are crying. Their short lives have only been dark, an eternal black stillness. Now there’s a deep red glow in the distance and they don’t understand it. We lie and tell them we understand it. We drag through the murk, drawing closer to the sanguine bloom.

Some foreign tension seems to squeeze the entire world. A slush of hot pine washes in from everywhere. We turn to each other. We embrace. Things are changing so fast we can only assume it has something to do with us. An earthrending scrape shocks us backward and the red grows deeper, wider, brighter. It’s everything we had feared. What will become of the children?

***

Excuses to stay home came easy. Like I said, things were burning, people were dying. If it weren’t for the game, I would have cancelled my internet. There was a feeling of wanting to say or do something, but even with all the right takes committed to memory, I couldn’t regurgitate anything without sounding lame. Couldn’t trust myself with social commentary. And I’d always been anxious to go outside, even before everything. I was of no use to anyone.

The itch on my taint had heightened. I never learned exactly where my prostate was but whenever I scratched down there the feeling was sublime, so maybe that was it. I hadn’t done heroin in twelve years yet here I was, cheat code acquired, circumnavigating my whole fucking character arc. It felt so good.

I cycled through ointments. Neosporin, then burn cream, then finally resorting to old moisturizers exes had left behind. Applying them felt right, even though I knew they did nothing, that underneath, something still festered. Their scents cloyed around my asshole and genitals. My thumbs bruised into the joysticks.

***

Closer to the glow, we’re assailed by a yellow squish that tries to eat through our necks. Some starving ghost from outside, making its way in. The world is poisoning itself. The young ones cough and sputter. We retreat to them, huddle them close. Everything will be alright!

Another searing torrent floods the cave. We herd the children behind a swollen polyp and tell them again, everything will be alright. Yellow ghost and blazing pine coalesce around us, choking out whatever else we might say. Things are burning everywhere inside. The ground and the water and our bodies start to disintegrate.

We have to do something. We join our tails and angle toward the red. Whatever is out there, pushing and oozing toward us, will destroy us if it gets in. Our only hope is escape. Our faces burn as we sink our bits into the membrane. We hold each other tight. We start to eat.

***

In the game, on a certain map, you’re deployed into an aquarium. The damage you can do to the environment seems limitless. You can shoot a small hole through the tank and watch the water pour out in a steady stream, or you can unload a shotgun so the cracks spiderweb out before the whole reef bursts free. With a PKM you might spray a line so the tableau crumbles all at once, fish and coral erupting in colors before the wave can even land.

Afterwards the fish lie flopping on the linoleum floor. Sometimes members of opposing teams stop to gather in the aftermath, foregoing their mutual destruction to wade through the slippery bodies. If you’re aimed directly at the ground, you can punch the fish into globs in all directions. If you punch at an angle, it will send the fish sailing across the concourse, sometimes freshly opened and oozing where your fist had landed, sometimes not.

The game developers, after a time, seemed to notice the trend. They added new fish, new impact physics, expanded the array of gore. They installed a pond to the map with new freshwater species to mutilate. The harpoon, a previously derided weapon, experienced a surge in popularity.

Tirelessly, eyes frying in my skull like bacon grease, I leveled up, leveled up, leveled up. I unlocked new outfits. I cloaked my character in a giant trout costume, its skin shiny and scaly. It was like how I imagined my own skin was becoming the more I picked and scratched. Whiteheads, the kind you get when a new tattoo gets staph and you’re not supposed to pop them, dotted my inner legs and wove up to my navel. I imagined their voices as wood nymphs’, deceptive and high-pitched, mimimimimi.

The area behind my ears had swollen with lymph, or something like it. Natural. Some people produce more lymph than others. The gin combatted a warm spread across my body with its own.

***

When you stay someplace long enough, you assume that place will last forever. You forget how it feels because it’s the only feeling. You eat the same things, you think the same things, you make babies and tell yourself this beautiful night might never end. Maybe for some it never does. The outside stays outside.

But sometimes it burns its way in. Sometimes your perfect walls decide to kill you and all you can do is tear them down.

Our chamber is flooded with chemical burn. Spiked yellow crystals drip down aquamarine grids, webbing us in, biting our skin. We eat and eat. The children’s cries echo in the gloom behind us. Sounds emanate from the brightening gash. Great mountainous moans, knells of a dying universe. The children will melt away in bloodglow. All will be for nothing. Our tails lock tight in that fatal determination that only comes in times of total panic. Eat, eat, or they’ll never make it.

Do you remember when they hatched?

Yes, of course. It was like knowing our purpose for the first time.

That’s right. It was like searching the abyss for diamonds and finding them inside ourselves.

We’re getting full now. Where we work our jaws we let in light, shimmering pink spears through the deep red. Liquid rust drains past us. We have opened small holes and they blink like the eyes of the world. There is something outside the universe, after all. We bite and tear and jerk forward. The world lurches, sloshing us unmercifully. We hold on.

***

The feeling was like waking up in my own puke, but the pieces were less rough, and the hue and viscosity of the liquid was more homogenous, clear with caviar-like lumps. There was blood where it pooled in my belly button. I couldn’t find the source of the wetness. It had expanded underneath me, up from my shorts, creeping. The menu screen droned its dirge-like tune, the same one I’d fallen asleep to, but warbled now, its tones swimming far away. Whatever had leaked out of me in my sleep was still coming.

I got to my feet. The whiteheads had spread to my soles, and they screamed as they popped. With each step to the bathroom, I lost fluid. But had the fluid ever been mine? Perhaps I was merely shedding it, not losing it. Not losing it so much as shedding it. Not losing…

The water in the tub was too hot. I forgot which handle I’d turned. A thousand vaporous screams whistled from my skin as I went under. I let my head fall till only my nose broke the water, an aimless fin. Under here I could scratch and the water swaddled the pain, made the digging easier. Different colors entered the water, making new currents, movements that would outlast mine.

***

With a tear and a final push the light floods us. Red gives way to blinding white, to the ideas of shapes. Warmth, not unlike the warmth of inside, but with something otherworldly to it, something rapturous, a holy warmth. Shudders of the old world, currents of the new. We float free from our home colossus. Where we’ve made it, we have no idea, but we’ve made it. Our future does not die today. It is born here.

The children emerge soon after, wriggling out behind us. They grow up so fast. It feels like moments ago they were still in their eggs, writhing translucent in the dark. Now they have many rings each, baubles pulsing from their tails to their snouts, nourished by our love and the flesh of our departed longhouse. They raise their heads to the crisp, blinding expanse of this new cosmos. They are brave. They will go forth to make eggs and babies of their own.

We hold each other, watching them swim away. We are too burnt and twisted to follow except with our eyes. Our strength fades, our lights dim from inside now. We feel the slime has melted off our eyes for the first time. Truly, we couldn’t be prouder.