the crows by Casper David Friedriech

darkness within       © 1999/2002  DUANA R. ANDERSON previously published in Earwig Flesh Factory

Evil grows in the dark, where the sun it never shines.
 Evil grows in cracks and holes,  and lives in people's minds.
 Evil grew, it's part of you, and know it seems to me,
 that every time I look at you, Evil grows in me. . .
--Terry Jacks & the Poppy Family, Evil Grows.

 

There was doll-house where I once lived, a green-peeling paint-chipped doll-house with creaking floors and dark closets full of bones, an attic cob-webbed and insulated with dark-scribbled paper-words, beetles scamp-scurrying through the garden, moving like a lucid night terror amidst the tiny gravestones.  The walls were papered with dusty moth-wings, moon-white and iridescent, stuck with the glue of my own blood.  I kept this house in the back woods, behind the shed, where fragmented patches of light beamed like Jacob's Ladders down through the trees. My hide-away-from-the-world.

It was there I collected dead things to play with: little sparrows with steaks of brown through their lovely decay, limp feathered bodies black-taped to the pelvis and legs of broken barbies.  I  found a old doll's head once, the eyes poked out like maggot-holes, the hair ratty tangles, and I filled it full of earthworms that looked like wiggling squirming brains.  It is amazing how you cut worms into so many thick writhing segments and they manage to stay alive.  Sometimes I would hear them screaming inside my head as they inched together, trying to attach the pieces of their severed bodies.

In the garden I planted dead snakes and salamanders, plush-velvet mice with beady black eyes, my cat's tail that had fallen off after it was slammed in the screen door, warty toads, pet hamsters and goldfish.  I made little tombstones out of rocks, and watched the dead-things grow, fertilized by slow decomposition, blackness seeping-creeping up through the ground like sewer-sludge, bubbling bloated stale-water brooks, grotesque flowers both violent and cruel, deep blood-red-purple, their velvety blossoms quivering like vagina-flowers.  I fed them bits of flesh and blood.

The blackness is everywhere, leaking up through the cracks in the sidewalks, under rocks that slither back into the soil, down drainpipes and crawling through the underbelly of the asphalt sea like rust-stains on a brick wall, like menstrual blood, sweet-fetid cloying death.  It moves through stark shadows consuming the light, gorging its black-bloated body with the living, sucking brains through ear canals like slurpy-straws, eating embryos in the womb and scrambling them with a twisted-coathanger fascination.  I never eat scrambled eggs now.

I vomit, purging abominations from my insides, smelling of fear-sweat in the darkness of the closet, the smell of my own sour urine on the back of my tongue.  My brains are screeching, inching along slug-like, trying to piece together the severed worm-meat.  It is amazing how the darkness can dissect the mind into so many distorted fragments and it manages to stay alive.
 

There was a swamp beside our house, a black lagoon, with slinky-slimy things slithering through the stagnant murk.  The trees here were swollen and warped with bulging ulcers, their knotted roots sucking darkness from the foul quagmire, their branches twisted with creeping moss and decay.  They reminded me of the violently distorted bodies of old men, exposed to hideous tortures, their bodies bent and broken and tumorous, trapped inside the body of a tree.   Grotesque living statues.  The trees oozed a black substance like tar, as if weeping or bleeding.

One day I found a small plastic kit with a bright yellow happy-face sticker affixed to the lid in the woods behind the shed, up where the junkies and winos lived in their cardboard boxes, burning twig and paper pyres into blackened soot, shooting sugar-smack and drinking cans of lysol, smoking other-people's-butts.  This treasure-box was full of hypodermic needles and syringes, scalpels and bloody gauze.  I filled the syringes with black ink and pinned toads to broken boards by their webby-feet, injecting black-poison-ooze into their rubber-tummies while their mouths opened and closed like bloated-faced guppies.  They died slowly, while I would slit their flesh with a sharp scalpel, peel back their skin and shiny-shivering intestines, turning them inside-out. Then I would feed them bits of severed earthworm, pieces of my mind, and watch them swallow and digest the meat.  They were always hungry for more.

The swamp has long been paved over by asphalt and a high-rise has grown out of the murk and decay, tall, dull and faceless.  Behind my house the shed still stands, but the dark woods were long ago bulldozed.  A foundation was built some years ago, and the project went bankrupt, so now cement pillars with rebar arteries jut out of the ground like severed limbs.  The neighborhood kids still go up there, late at night, burnt offerings of twig, paper, plastic, scorching the dirt, smoking cigarettes and reefers, chug-a-lugging jungle-juice lifted from their parents liquor cabinets.  I can hear them laughing at me through my walls.  They are greedy little creatures.

The blackness has trickled through the prosaic-grey of drug-induced stupor, this murky space of non-emotion, of vagueness, and evasion.  It has found me in my hiding-spaces, between the wall and bed, buried under pillows and quilts in my little warm cave, sucking my pruney thumb and humming.  The windows are now papered with newspapers and black electric tape, ripe jagged scars and ribbons of flesh.  Still the sunlight beams through little pin-pricks, tiny Jacob's Ladders, dustmotes hovering within the glowing shafts like wasp's swarming rotted meat.  There are slivers of paper-thin glass all over the floor in the living room, smashed glass from lightbulbs popping against the wall.  My bloodied feet leave warm wet streaks that dry to flaky smudges.  I try to stay away from shiny surfaces, cold, metallic objects that capture the light.  My television stares at me with its blind hollow eye, never blinking, ragged smiling maw of broken glass, chewing on the viscera of tangled wires, speaking bloody-gurgles.

This house has passed through three generations.  From crone to mother to me, the three phases of the moon.  I have become the crone, the terrible devil-goddess of death, queen of shades, planting seeds in my garden and waiting for them to bloom. The wallpaper has yellowed and is peeling on the edges, flesh peeling away to exhume the bones of this old house.  I keep the doors to my closets closed, still I see the blackness seeping rivers of blood from underneath.  I've scrubbed my flesh raw with SOS pads, peeled the filth from my skin with a cheesegrater, watch the red trickle down the drain to join the blackness.  The desperation/hunger clings to me, craving and obsessed, and I am drowning in my own nausea from the cloying stench of death.  What's behind door number three?  I see a headline pasted on my window: ‘Six children missing.  Kidnapper on the loose.' and wonder what it means.  Somewhere deep inside the blackness I hear whispers, gnawing, scraping bones creaking, children laughing/crying, dark voids devouring my brain.
 

My mother told me a story of long ago before she was born, a story her mother told her when she was a child.  There lived a family next door, a man, his wife and their seven ugly-ducklings. The house was a rundown old shack, salt-water grey planks withered like old bones, brittle and infested.  The yard was overgrown and choked with weeds, littered with rot and refuse, broken toilets, rusted car parts, tin cans and barbed wire, the hedges grown up around the house like a thorny fortress.  The man was gaunt with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, aged by the abuse he received from the meaty hand of his ogress wife.  He would try to lure the little neighborhood children into his yard with sweets, and there have them defile his pathetic, wrinkled penis with their sticky candy-smeared hands.  His wife was obese, slug-like and would scream at her seven hideous little cherubs and beat them on the backs with a wooden spoon.

Occasionally, children would go missing, but no-one ever did anything, not back then.  Eventually the old hag stopped coming out to scream, and the rotten chits stopped coming out to play.  Day and night the pounding of hammers and the shrill of power saws were heard.  Then one day only silence.  After several weeks the cops beat down the door and found the man hanging by the attic rafters reeking of piss and excrement.  His wife had been carefully dissected in the bath-tub, her intestines pulled out like a long tube of sausage and shoved down her throat. Much of her flesh and meat was missing, carefully stripped off.  The children were a bit of a mystery however for quite sometime.  Finally, one of the detectives noticed holes in one of the walls and the horrible odor of decay.   Once the plaster was removed, the remains of the children were found as well as ones missing from the neighborhood.  They had been buried alive in the walls, trapped by the plaster so they couldn't move and fed the carcass of their mother, until the old man hung himself and they eventually died of starvation.  The house was eventually torn down and a swamp grew up around it.  My mother would stay awake at night, afraid to sleep, afraid the boggy-man from the black lagoon next door would come to get her and bury her alive.  Years later I would stay up listening to the crickets shrilling in the swamp next door and watch the blackness ripple, eating holes in my walls.

The blackness is nearly complete now.  It has a voracious appetite, devouring everything around it like a black hole swallowing whole solar systems.  I have been sitting still for an eternity, lost in flowering madness, mute and vacantly staring, a wraith-like observer watching shadows creep over the freshly painted wall.  I feel the grey drizzle of cold horror, the darkness yawning inside of me, dreadful, unspeakable wickedness.  I am hungry and realize I have chewed off my own tongue and speak in bloody gurgles.  The darkness is feasting upon my gums leaving gaping hollows of blood.  My head is swelling like a bladder filling with piss.  I look down at my naked body, exposed, flesh neatly removed in strips and chunks of juicy meat cut off in bite-size hunks on a plate before me.

I hear the scratching, little fingernails clawing at plaster, moans whimpering, children laughing/crying.  My wall has hungry little mouths that chew up my meat and cry for more.  Little bird-beaks gorging on the worms of my flesh, shrieking screams with no beginning or end.  They are greedy, ravenous little creatures and are eating me alive.  It is amazing how much flesh you can cut from your body and manage to live, though just barely.  The blackness has finally turned me inside-out and now the maggot-worms crawl all over me.  

manifest | covet | exhume | possess | bleed | breathe
 gaze  |  sacrifice  | writhe  |  stalk | lust | expose | intercourse

 :: M A I N ::

© 2002 DUANA R. ANDERSON.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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