Man in a Cage by Brian M. Stableford

Author:Brian M. Stableford [Stableford, Brian M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497632561
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-05-12T01:34:50+00:00

Madman’s Dance

Crying in the Wilderness

I remember, my faceless friend, that all these torments were made by your steel-sheathed hands, even the heart of this infernal summer when the thinnest of winds burns me like vitriol, and stones by the wayside glow like salamanders in the fearful violence of the multitude of suns.

I remember, and I will remember.

Always.

Remember the brittle-black corpse on a bed of sand pebbles, with its limbs like fire-fraught twigs — ashen, ghostly forms which yield to the slightest question.

Remember the poisonous vapors which halo its stark form, and the unbearable heaviness of the air which walks around it.

Remember the thin dust, which the vibration of our toilsome passage made of that dead thing, rendering it instantaneously into the earth from which its ancestors dragged their original seed. And even the black dust burns, so finely divided it becomes, and the rest of the carcass is transformed into the lesser substance of the air.

Remember the sound of the hovering flies and the marching beetles crying anguish for the wholeness of a death which robs even the carrion of their accustomed part. Even the all-conquering worm cannot play its heroic last scene in the harrowing script which you have designed to fit every act of the play that you have named “Man.” Death is cruel and unrelenting in all your days and nights, and even the carrion grow hungry and cannot sleep.

Remember the grasses that conquered the empires of Rome and Babylon, sighing this day and growing dark-skinned themselves, their stems crouching low upon the ground like fugitive snakes. The wind does not sigh in the crowns of the trees, because the trees have abdicated their given kingdom, and shed their raiment out of season.

Remember the lizards in the rocks and the cockroaches and the painted frogs which are frozen by fire, their marbled eyes glaring anger and reproach from their petrified skins.

Remember. I do and I will. I survive.

You can make me forget everything except the way home. There is another shore, you know, upon the other side . . . another world.

You can’t kill me. I’m you.

This totally consumed offal, without any legacy of life to give away, even to the worms, is the end that you promise to the chosen of Canaan. Not loss of life, but loss of being. Not extinction, but erasure. This end is the privilege of all that you have given to keep me company in Canaan — the faceless and the forlorn, the hopelessly insane, the images of antiman, the idols and the demons which look into my face when I am only a mask. The eyes without a face, behind the mask that is myself, remember and record these reflections of my garish, painted face, my false and hypocritical soul. I know this for what it is — not hell, but an attempted exorcism that would deny me even that. But no matter what qualities of mercy you renounce, however utterly, no matter how vengeful your spirit, you cannot cast away this mask that is myself.

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