Catastrophe Jones

I can hear them getting closer.

In the back, where it’s warm up against the boiler, I can smell the tang of must and mold; if I breathe heavy, it curls up in my mouth and nose, something like a big, dumb, wet dog that I don’t hate but wish would die so that it would just stop pawing at me.

Boots coming down the stairs. Heavy things, clunky soles, shiny material, gleaming buckles. Except there’s no shine, no gleam in the dark. And the thick of their soles don’t pound on the stairs — they float down on frightened feet, half-dancing down creaking, rickety stairs. They want to be quiet.

Basements are the lairs of monsters, you know.

They didn’t turn the upstairs light on, so there aren’t any dancing shadows to point them out, and they didn’t bother with flashlights this time.

Maybe they’re learning.

I can hear their breathing, drawn through pinched nostrils and grim lips. They’re tasting the basement air for the first time, and the big, dumb, wet dog has just leapt to press both paws into their chests, caving them in with the scents of cold and rot.

They’re getting closer.

If I hadn’t had it replaced by a silent model, I would’ve thought you heard my heart in my chest.
If I hadn’t gotten that ‘auto adjust’ option on my irises, I could’ve let you be the only thing in focus.
If I hadn’t had my pheromones disguised to keep away the mod-scavengers, I would’ve thought you scented me, through the crowd.
If I hadn’t recently been degaussed, I could’ve made some sort of joke about my magnetic personality.
If I hadn’t simply had it removed for lack of use, I would’ve spoken to you words of long dead poets through a mouth that I think might’ve been made to kiss you. Well, If you’d still had yours.

But here we are, on the verge of the twenty-second century, and I’m dying to “love you in the old high way of love”, except that it doesn’t matter because you already had the aural-replacement done.

Here we are, all smooth skin and shining LEDs, the whisper of progress clutching cool fingers around my reptile brain, holding it down in a cage of laughing electricity.

Here we are, shifted, changed, sliced up and put back together, different, all in the name of wanting to fit in, and somehow we’re still lacking a connection.

Here we are.

Somewhere along the way, they stopped saying “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Somewhere along the way, they stopped having to listen to the comforting words of friends, acquaintances, strangers. Somewhere along the way, she stopped leaving, and took to sleeping in the extra room, a silent presence that would be there and gone again, somehow knowing when he preferred to be alone, and knowing when he preferred company, if not necessarily conversation. At the funeral, she let her bare hand trail over a peaceful face, beckoning to the fore the soul that had to be there. Had to. Begging, really, and it was only the look of steel-grey eyes that finally let her step back and go to sit along with the few mourners that came along to share their own grief.

It wasn’t until about three weeks later, after the coffin had been put in the ground, that he woke to find her standing near the bed, her large eyes wide in the dark, one bare hand touching the empty pillow next to his head, a look of grief on her pretty face.

There were no words, none at all; neither had them, never really had them, and when she lifted her eyes to let them rest on his, they both realized they didn’t need them.

The ghost of electricity howls through my veins, a crackling blue silver I can feel dancing along my bones, laughing behind my eyes. The remnants of it flicker within my still-beating heart, and the buzz-hum of it washes over my lips, arcing against my tongue.

Somewhere, not too far, there is a dripping, a thin arpeggio of liquid chaotically falling, ripples spinning through a black puddle, fractals of reflections left shimmering in the wake of movement.

I’m not alone. Across thin wires and magnetic membranes, a symphony of voices rings, resounding in a crescendo of fire that lifts, heats, explodes in a cataclysmic rush of fury.

A choir of fallen angels to herald the damned, the disconnected.

Some of us dropped away in the night. Before the dawn could wink out what stars remained, they fell to a hush that suffocated warmth, extinguished purpose and whispered of what was to come for all of us, yet we lay there, mingled and tangled, the last scrapes of power fluttering, the last flickers of it guttering, the dying breath of a drowning multitude.