An Exercise

Here's a little exercise of mine that turned out well. It's a visual piece.

The grass was long caressing his face in tune with the light breeze passing through it like an intruder. A stone was chewing at his buttocks systematically carving through the naked skin. The sky was like a moving picture; black and white. The white patches were long streaks following the direction of the grass inexorably disappearing in the horizon like so many streams on their journey towards the ocean.

The yellow moon, stark in its contrast with the sky shone dimly over the landscape. He could not look at the moon for its colour forced his sense of smell to focus on sharp, sterile fragrance of his own encrusted urine. His body slowly sank further into the soft earth beneath him; later he would realize that the catalyst for the softening ground had been the taste in his mouth, coppery and fluid.

The papers would later recount the events of this night of horror. The pain he felt in his body was nothing compared to the tortures in his mind. He could deal with his body but the prison of pain kept him trapped there like an inmate, an innocent man serving an inescapable life sentence. He fought through it for the pleasure of physical pain was a prize he wanted but each time he escaped something dripped in his eye, breaking his concentration like wardens that kept dragging him back to his cell. Each time, back in his mind, he started recounting events, recounting to the point where he could no longer accept the truth then he would feel the stone beneath him, notice the red tint on the grass around him, the pain in his joints, the broken toes of his right foot and then; the drip.

The drip would drag him back; a drop at a time bleeding into his eye. The drip painted the sky red and the moon would be a bloody eye staring, accusingly, back at him. The drifting white streams would become torrents of blood rushing over the cliff that was the horizon and again he would recount the blood of the evening and the pain. The drip would once again drag him back to his mind. It never occurred to him to lower his head but then he would want to close his eyes and that would trap him inside all night. He could not have lowered it, had he wanted to.

At one point there was a blue light flashing through the grass and voices of men calling unintelligibly. He had not answered for humans were a threat to him and his new found sense of violation. That sense would concretize in the presence of another human being and he would be forced to physically recount the evening. He did not think that he would be able to survive a retelling; he could barely survive going into his own mind, what with actively recalling.

The moon sank ever lower, his own eyes following its down descent and its occasionally conspiratorial red blink at him, like it knew him, like he knew it. The lower it sank, the dimmer it became; the grass had disappeared in a haze and the stone was now a part of him. As he followed the moon he increasingly felt the physical pain numb even as the mud around him became slicker and slicker. Even his mind became less of a burden as he was only forced to witness the occasional flash of memory running through it.

When he and the moon had almost disappeared the sky was beginning to take on colour; blue. He watched blue gradually overpowering the black and white and the more prominent blue became the less he was aware of himself. He knew he still existed but he did not know how, why or in what form but the moon, the moon was the only entity he could identify with, they were one.

When it was about to expire he reached out to it beseechingly and it blinked once last time as they both died.