a.myth=am(p)utate:d
passage two
(continued from passage one)
by Josh Smith
Hundreds of hazy
angles flood your mind in a flash, overcoming your balance. The ground finally
releases its grip on your feet, and though only a second passes in the fall, you
feel as if you were dropped from the most distant corner of the sky. Your newly
dissipated form lifts you against your will and begins to move you towards the
city. Your multiple diffused viewpoints attach themselves to grains of sand in
increments and eventually become a barely decipherable map that leads your rough
shape through the bustle of natives.
Your faceless half
has full control over the rest of your body. You are unable to read its
thoughts, unable to predict where on this unstable chart it leads you. All that
remain are five senses, enhanced, but nearly impossible to control due to the
flood of information being pumped through you from the citizens of this nation.
You feel your mind being tugged in one thousand directions at once, but your
inhabited body pulls harder toward its own undisclosed destination. It is
finally revealed by hundreds of eyes, from multiple positions, multiple heights.
This is where you are being taken. You are sure of it. A building that towers
above the rest, but is by no means in better condition. They surround it; these
faceless. Vultures circling the one carcass large enough to sustain them all in
the middle of this desolate wasteland. You notice that their pacing slows
relative to your proximity, and by the time you arrive, they have completely
frozen, leaving a small space through which you are to pass.
Upon entering the building, the
stench of this rotting kingdom intensifies. You try to recoil, you try to return
to open air, but your instincts fail to pass beyond the border of what was once
your brain. The inside is dark – despite the high sun alone in the sky – lit
only through thin, broken panels of driftwood walls. You move along these dirt
floors, led down these winding, narrow halls which seem to run in a jagged
spiral around the building, from the outer walls to the center.
A group of six faceless sit in a
circle in the center of what appears to be the only room in the building. Their
thoughts creep into your mind, tuning out the rest of the populous with their
amplified signal. These incoming ideas feel strange, as if spoken in some visual
code that you can not quite crack. You are carried closer to the six, who stand
as you pass into their ring. When you reach dead center, you are stopped. The
six that surround you slowly approach, each lifting an arm towards the head that
has replaced your own. One after another, their hands rest atop this head, atop
one another. The sensation that ensues is one of an intense pull from above,
from six sides, tearing pieces of you from yourself, and from your faceless
parasite. Breathless. Unable to respond. Removed. Divided among seven faceless
strangers.
Your life.
Your insides. Your outsides.
Your physical. Your mental.
Your past. Your future.
Your regrets. Your expectations.
Yourfailures.Yoursuccesses.
Your death.
You face forward seven times and
are carried in seven directions toward a single task. Your fourteen hidden eyes
witness the bodies gathering along the shoreline, around the deteriorating
tower, near the crumbled shacks that these people called homes, and on a stretch
of level soil between the spire and the water. The rest seem to scatter among
stones and shrubbery. This motion is too severe; your remaining awareness slips
away into the grasp of captors.
The seven of you move through the
city, working without delay – or your consent. Your hands lift thirsty plants
from plates of earth, they pry splintering wood from the walls of the central
tower, from rooftops of huts as your body bends to lift sun bleached logs from
the sand while you wade out into blue to greet another as it drifts ashore where
your back burns from the weight of stone slabs carried in from forgotten
foundations and piled where you stoop to clear the square located in the shade
of the tower that you dismantle with little effort as you fuse water with
vegetation and stack each recovered fragment of wood near the substructure you
and you construct, and assemble a procession of bricks stretching from the sea
to the central square where timber and mortar become rooftops soon to extend
across walls of new brick that you, you, you, you, you, you, you and your entire
city of faceless workers manufacture until just after dusk and in this twilight
exhaustion sets in, but your seven bodies spare you no rest as they attach the
wide rooftop panels that mark completion of this cathedral.
While the faceless masses mill about
its walls, the many who are you proceed inside for a long and well deserved
night of rest.
In the morning, you arise with a dry
mouth, but wholly refreshed and invigorated to find yourself alone in your own
body. Exiting the shelter built of your sweat, your bare feet leave a trail in
the sand, marking strides toward the comforting sea. A wall of cloaked residents
lines the beach at your back as waves fall around your legs. There is no need to
look. You feel their presence as if you were with them staring out at this
voyager who came into their home – somewhat familiar, certainly foreign – to
unknowingly return it to them.
The ocean breeze becomes a gust
becomes a gale that brings clouds from the horizon. The water begins to splash
before you. Drawing closer, the raindrops find your face. Looking down, through
a spattered distortion, the current halts, then ebbs against its flow in the
contour of a human body stretched out from your feet to mock your shadow. His
arm moves from his side, then waves goodbye. Tilt your head to the clouds,
squint through their mist as it tingles too softly on your skin – so softly you
question its existence. With both eyes and mouth agape, you witness a million
drops come slowly down, then halt. You reach out to touch a defiant bead that
evades grasp with a quick upward shift. You lift your arms to the suspended rain
and are in turn lifted toward its source.
