Monday, August 8, 2011

A Case For Suicide

Posted by A Great Liar

“It’s nothing but a tale of the living and the dead, and the ones in between.” I watched the main street from the window of the apartment, thinking out aloud. “It’s funny that each man now walking across this street, is merely following the long lost trails of his ancestors who must have walked the same line, trudged on the same cobblestones and occasionally admired a fleeting beauty passing by, some whistling and rest in awe.”

Ammo replied. “Have you never no hope, Lev? You know you ought to say something nice tonight, it’s your birthday, for creeper’s sake”. A half burned cigarette dangling from her left hand, a thinly clad wrist with white hairless skin and bones strikingly jutting out. The many misnomers of drug abuse blended with hours spent in artistic torture.

I continued on, for a moment mindless of her incitements of hope. “And the ones before them, and before that, and so on. Hence the ironic cycle of life, and God’s great cast of actors and actress upon this planet.”

Ammo replied. “Don’t you think that it’s a blessing that most of them, including you hopefully, will live to see another year.”

“Yes, though I hardly consider it a cause of celebration.” I replied. “Living is but one of the strangest acts of suicide, Ammo.” My voice low enough to qualify as a whisper. “It’s an acknowledged descent into the abyss, self willed, but done with hope, with flair, and in high spirits. An act of self annihilation done in extremely good taste.”

She said. “Perhaps you need to live a little more, Lev. And need to see beyond the veil of your opinions.” Paused. “Perhaps you also need to take into account the very possibility that you and your cockamamie opinions about life and the rest of the haberdashers surrounding it could be wrong.”

Sunday, July 10, 2011

A Thousand Pig Heads On Sticks

Posted by A Great Liar

It’s a day to be quiet; spent in anger and disguise. Because it’s a kind of day that scares you, scares you deep, and scares you good, real good I mean. When you are afraid of nothing more around you, but only yourself.

Afraid of what you have become, if only for a day.

And so you take a day off, a day off from yourself. The trick is to just take a back seat and watch the world go, like a small tin can rolling down the slanted street.

And if you would watch it for too long, you would realize that it’s never rolling in, nor rolling out. Because it never grows too near nor too far, it just rolls.

So what do you do?

You just light the bloody cigarette and take a walk down that street. You simply roll with the can, and never take your eyes off it. You watched it dance, and follow suit. Watch it pull every god damn trick from the bag that is there to be had, and you watch. And ask no questions.

No questions ever. Because there are no answers to be had.

And once you have walked far enough, long enough, you realize you are not alone. No way near! There are people, and always more people. It’s a form of rejoice, a bloody festival out there. Like an ugly welcome, watching them grinning, or somber to the core.    

Walking down the street, filled with walking sticks, moral harelips and hunchbacks, people all around, it was like watching a thousand pig heads sticking out of thousand human torsos, made me feel like a captive walking down an Indian gauntlet, walking down to the scaffold. 

And continued on. Walkin’, and humming, trying not to finish my cigarette in a hurry. Trying to make every moment count. Knowing this is as close to fun as I am capable of being.

And then, from the corner from my eyes, I see a beggar approaching. A beggar with a shine. A physical matchstick of a man with perhaps only enough blood pumped each day to keep the chest heaving.

As the beggar neared, smiling, I spotted a set of healthy white teeth unveiled as his lips widened.

What a smile? I wondered. Now realizing where all the blood in his veins was spent. Like every fiber of his body and soul, the heart, the bones and the blood, committed for one jingle of glory; to keep the teeth shining.

And I moved on. Ignoring him as soon as I first noticed him.

Straight down my eye line, a mother is comforting a little punk ass of her son, a fat round spoiled brat who had just found out that the world isn’t something to be taken granted for. While mother cuddles him, telling him things that like most parents do, things that little punk ass kid like this one has no use for, nor the care.

I watch the kid sobbing, making economical use of his limited set of tears. Spending each with prolonged intermissions, while filling the gap with noise that, with their varying ebb and flow, perhaps represented more grief than there was a genuine case for.

And the woman with expensive embroidery around her hanging cowish motherly skin, the kind of skin that has given birth to hordes of such brats, one too many perhaps, and dark eye shades, kept telling him to trust her, and to have faith in God, though which of those statements she actually meant to be true, it was hard to guess.

Apparently the little kid has taken a fall, face first, into the hard concrete ground, chasing a wild puppy in the street, apparently meaning more harm than love to that innocent creature of God.

And his nose bled, and the bleeding wouldn’t stop, and each drop only brought him closer to death, closer to the unknown, or so the fat kid in big shorts thought. Knowing that he only meant harm to an innocent soul, to a puppy that was now nowhere to be seen, and there would be hell to pay if he dies now, without repentance.

And deservingly so. I mused and moved on. All men should burn for what they do. 5 years old or 85, what’s the difference?

Leaving them to their perils behind, I reached for the cell from my pocket, wishing to make a connection. Recalling an earlier conversation I had, or the lack of it for that matter. Because a phone call spent in silent misunderstanding is not conversation.

Make a connection. But with what? I fumbled in my thoughts. It’s hard to understand the man who woke up in my bed today, it’s hard to look him in the mirror and reach out.

I slipped the cell back in my pocket, wishing nothing no more. Afraid of the disappointment that might await me on the other end of the frequency. Because a hope of being loved, and of being understood, of expectations, bring along with them a hordes of fear and apprehensions.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

A Little Scared Boy (An Excerpt)

Posted by A Great Liar


(The following is an excerpt from the currently undergoing novel, The Liar's Lobe)

At first, it seemed the descent would never end as a little scared boy trailed down the wooden stairs. Then his stumbling blind feet hit the surface and the boy took a sigh of relief.

The earth beneath his feet felt hard and cold as he took first couple of steps. Feeling his way in, swallowed by the blind eater that masqueraded as dead darkness all around him.

Have mercy! Something in him screamed. Part of him that was wallowing in hopelessness since the day Grandpa has passed away.

Watching someone die like the way Grandpa did was like catching someone with his pants down. Stripped of all human dignity, and Danny didn’t think you are ever forgiven for that little sneak peak into reality.

He recalled the time when he saw the thing from the Grandpa's room for the first time, a night after Grandpa's died, a thing that walked and even made itself sound like Grandpa used to, approaching his room in the middle of the night, his back against me, and it starting to turn around.

And it was just as well that Danny got scared and ran back before he could face him. Deep within he knew he could never face Grandpa again, not even when it wasnt quite Grandpa that he had to face, but something else, something that only walked and talked like his Grandpa used to. 

From above he heard Jimmy calling out for him. He sounded worried. But Danny chose to stay and begged for darkness to feed him. He had come too far and there was no turning back.

His patience paid off as it seemed that the darkness finally listened to him. He began to see. The cellar was a small round sphere surrounded by layers of thickly infested dust and cobwebs. Against the wall on his left he saw shelves with portholes carved in them.

Most of them seemed empty, except couple of them as Danny poked around in the dim light.  

A square looking black object seemed to peek through the shelf’s opening.

Danny thought the little thing smiled at him.

He didn’t think when Lewis Carroll dreamed of rabbit holes of his own, he ever believed it could prove to be a doorway to things so demonic and destructive. He had thought rabbit holes to be fantastical apertures to other worlds, where life is full of color and magic. Warped in a strange but nice form of reality that make our most outrageously enlightening dreams seem like a discourse into dullness.

When Danny first laid eyes on the book, he forgot to breath. The blood underneath the skin slowly flushed out of his face, his eyes unable to focus on the black leatherbound book he found from the secret cellar in our backyard, stranded in the cobwebs and layers of dust.

Because for one brief moment, what Danny saw wasn’t some old book from the Grandpa’s past, but a thing born of darkness, of Danny’s worst nightmares and most secret dreads. A dark and slimy thing crouched in one of the portholes lined up against the wall of the cellar.

Who are you? Danny choked as the words he began to speak only succeeded to echo deep inside of him.

I am you. The dark-thing said and gave him a winning smile. Danny believed the things had eyes watching him. Weighing him down with a lots of love, the kind that gives you goosebumps and makes your blood run cold. 

I am you. The dark-thing repeated.   


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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

A World Without Air

Posted by A Great Liar

The world of dreams is a silent facade, a showy misrepresentation intended to conceal something unpleasant, something that we have all heard of, and strive for, and none achieve. If time is the big bad ball of ice rolling down the giant snow peak in clockwise motion, then the hope for happiness is the antithesis of it, an anti-clockwise act of desperation, of human struggle against the pitiless Void of creation that some call Nature, and others God.

The point is the absolute pointlessness of the whole thing. The point is not the snowball falling down the mountain, the point is why it is there in the first place.

And the point is, if there is a mysterious Machinist responsible for all the existence in the earth and beyond, a Machinist hidden to the common eye behind the veil of infinity, call it Nature or God, would it suffice as good enough explanation, a justification of sorts that everything that is there, or isnt there for that matter, is but a willfull act of Divine Providence, as it were.

But irrespective of all that, of whether we need, or could, justify anything that there is to be justified or not, the fact remains that we all live in a world without, rather than in a world within. We humans are mere entities of self denial, in a way that we forever refuse to acknowledge or be at peace with what we are, instead are in constant striving for what we arent, or dont have.

Every man or woman, no matter how mundane a soul he or she is, or how insufficient in imagination or ambition, seeks to do an act or follows a trail of otherworldiness, of that most beautiful of all that is unreal and fantastic, better known as the pursuit of happiness.
  
We are all fiddlers, freting their way into the unknown future, curious and babbling, lauging and crying, loving and hating, but always seeking to divulge from our own present form and circumstances. Whereas the ones in light seek the dark, and spent their lifetime doing it, like poor old saints trying to become clumsy sinners.

And the ones in the dark forever crave for the light, stumbling to light candles of hope, never realizing that it is not the darkness they fight against, but the very absence of light in their lives.
 
And all the while, the ball keeps rolling down the peak, and hence the pointlessness of it all.

Though we choose not to hear it coming, we choose instead to keep looking for a whiff of fresh air in a world devoid of the very substance that we call air.

We chose to do the impossible against the face of nothingness, because it is only human to do so.

We chose not to await the ball to finishing rolling, but to try and live in this world without air... 


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Monday, May 30, 2011

Spider

Posted by A Great Liar

25 years, a life span most of the mygalomorph spiders are expected to share, years spent in captivity of the predatory inclinations inherent in my kindred; catching the unexpected prey with a silken smile, O the irony of that; I have never been fond of non-predatory feeding, if there is such a term.

With fangs that inject venom to a mere wanderer in my parlor, a Sicilian death kiss most of them find a little too sticky, though they never complain, was a necessary predicament of my livelihood; feeding my little young ones, like a good mother that I am; always making a point of eating the eyes off my prey, for my little ones did not deserve to see the glimpse of darkness in the dead eyes; the accusing look that dwells there forever.

Death was a necessity, I once thought, and was proven wrong in the course of my lifetime; the long tedious hours spent in the hollow shade of wait, watch and wait, soundless and like a shadow that casts no suspicion to the unsuspecting prey; it became a pleasure.

I have stared down many desperate faces, in fear and hopelessly deprived, throbbing and pulsating from the sigh of the silent specter before them, some begging for mercy, others dimly hoping for it, none ever appreciating death; the value they put on their lives ……

‘Is it a bad thing’, one of my young one once asked me, having watched me taking the life out of one of my victims, ‘to make a living of their lives’; ‘No’, I told him with a smile, ‘once they are caught in the silken fate, it is all right to feed off them’; a curious babbling fledgling he was, soon he will learn the underlying principles of death and dying.

Soon I will too learn the fears that enveloped my prey, now having grown in both wisdom and age; a little too much of both is a luxury none can ever afford; waiting … waiting for a silent silken kiss.