ANTISOCIETIES by Michael Cisco

Author:Michael Cisco [Cisco, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror; weird
Publisher: Grimscribe Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

When at last I do sleep, I see the man’s eyes in the shadow. I am up above him, kneeling on him, my head in the light and his below, in a shadow that closes over his face like the surface of a lake. I hold him under. The swimming eyes are barely visible, only two crescent gleams in the nebulous pallor of the contorted face, full of unfeigned shock and fear. And now, with hatred too? They appear below me, not quite from beneath the floor, screened by a sheet of light from the lamp that falls between us like a lid on the shadow. What are you doing here? That’s what they’re asking.

Despite myself my mind returns to what I saw in late September, when I screamed Snowy’s name so hard I felt my soul leave my body—when Snowy fell among the trees and her neck snapped—when I saw the beast slithering toward her from the shuddering curtains of leaves and the shadows beneath the blue stones, like a coruscating amalgam of every part of the day, and leaned over her, you, Snowy, and when it stood up straight, it turned its face, now your face, to see me and to try its new smile on me, its nightmarish smile. That day I stood over you. I looked down on you. I saw your face wasn’t yours any more. “The wind rose in the trees, stirring the mourning doves.” You didn’t look like yourself, because that thing from the woods, the beast, took your likeness—and still has it, after all these empty years. Hiding behind those empty years now, turning them into the haunted, sacred forest by the Purlieus. The smile even now tries to destroy your real image, it gnashes its teeth in my memory, a bullet hole in the portrait, it gibbers, bites, shatters the sunlit day like painted glass. But nothing can stop you from floating back up into view as you were when you hurried to your mother’s bedside, framed in the window I looked through. Nothing could have prevented you from looking at the little painting hidden inside the wall, even knowing what that would mean for someone in your family. Nothing can prevent your name and image from being the banner planted in me that makes me who I am, and that I am still who I am is my triumph over the beast. You gave your life, your smile, your face, because you loved me. You sacrificed yourself for me, Snowy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.