In the weeks before my demise, I watched Emmi from the distant shore. Her body, that pristine being I so briefly embraced, was wrapped in someone else’s skin. She was laughing. She was laughing with this other. That snicker, emitted from one I thought so pure, was carried and amplified by the wind’s conspiring air, a propagation of vibrations reaching my ear, to set about their vicious work and strum the fetid strings of my heart. I stood, listening, reading each unspoken word, noting every subtle move, her tilt of neck and position of hand. I saw it all until I could take no more. I turned and left, departing the village by the lake, the journey of my unkempt soul nourished on nothing but the rotten fruit of hurt. I bled inside. I doused fires with tears poured endless from my eyes. The forest’s birds, shapeless and silhouetted against the night sky, mocked me with their corvine squawks. My awareness—that wealth of observation Emmi’s presence brought forth—began to retreat. I forgot what it was to see. I ignored the stars and clouds. I walked hollow and morose, treading the same spiral path, exhausting the pine and spruce-lined tracks (unknowing yet knowing that it—the creature, oneiric and unsated—was there, trailing out of view, burned away by each morning’s sun), all until I found myself returned, to the cabin I shared with those whose names I never cared to know.
Emmi was there, waiting, a claim of worry about her serpent lips. She spoke, asking where I had been, why the shape of my brow resembled the crippled bark of ash. I answered. I lied. My eroded core remained hidden beneath the thin carapace of my skin. Whether she knew or not I could not say, for the look in her eyes, held within each sphere of perfect jade, showed only a star, a galaxy, a cluster of infinite worlds. That restoration, that pathetic rush and surge, the incomparable high brought on by a single word and glance and crescent smile… to know of such is only when they are yours to hold, delivered solely to you. I was frail and weak and so easily turned, dying my second death to be resurrected by her eyes. Her hand laced with mine, each finger whispering its final curse. She said that soon it would be time; asked if I would come. And I agreed. Of course I agreed, for what else could I do? I would go with her, into the forest at night, to seek that which she sought.
Days elapsed before I led Emmi to her grave, and through each I crept and watched. She was there, always around the lake, on that hallowed path I thought was ours. There she stood, there with another, their huddled forms blurred in the waning light, the very image destroying my soul.
*
Perhaps now I have written enough. These words—inscribed and jumbled in time and meaning—are apt to wander to my most default of states: that of lies, of signals misread, of entire conversations whose vestiges remain nothing but the broken wings of memory. They are, in all their final forms, filaments that stretch taught, frail membranes upon whose diaphanous surface lingers only the trace element of truth, a fragile reality clouded by the cataract of fiction. Long have I dwelt upon its crystalline peaks. Long have my feet, aware of each cruel crevasse, repeated their descent to the jagged and infinite depths, fissures filled with the crushing pressure of remorse. Jealousy, that most archaic molecule of hate, has now fled; in its place are the churning tides of guilt, borne forever on carnal ribbons of flesh. But what clarity or justification do these admissions produce? Who is it that these words are for, that may find solace or meaning in what little I have said? Not Emmi. My words to her cannot undo what was done. There is no transmutation, no ambrosia or Ankh or grail to be found. This pen is no alembic, the ink, dark and abyssal, incapable of distilling the cruel nature of my hands. There is only the truth, the dull and awful facet that, enclosed and alone, this solitary creature must face. And so again I retreat, a final retreat, the hypoesthesia of my mind a final shield to stand erect as companion to these bars, these weathered walls, these encrusted sheets.
*
Sometimes, when the moon’s flat and silver disc rises visible in the sky, I wonder whether everything, all the decisions that comprise my pathetic life, haven’t occurred at all. Whether they are dream, false memories that swim toxic along hillock and synapse, along distensions that know nothing but a gradient of ions, a flux of charge, a labyrinthine array that, in the totality of miracle, give rise to the tortures of love and lust and loss. But then I awaken, recount it all, bear witness once more. For years I have wished Emmi was the myth, that it was her that did not exist, that she, like the invisible pheromones secreted by translucent moths, was something fabricated from desire. Yet I know that is not the case. She was real. She was a gift bestowed upon the earth, her atoms returned by an act unimaginable.
In her final moment she sought that which she could not see. A creature. A monster.
She had no way of knowing that the monster was me.
And with that, it is done. The Sernox is concluded. The tale, if one can call it such, has been written. I will let it simmer for now, along with my feelings. This is the first story (beyond single post type things) that I have finished. That feels… strange.
Do let me know what you think. I will be cowering in the comments with half an eye open.
You can find the other parts here: Part 1 > Part 2 > Part 3 > Part 4 > Part 5 > Part 6.
Oh and we can message people now it seems. If a DM is your kinda thing, there’s a button for that:
OH.MY.GOD. You did not!!!!! A love expressed so purely, divinity itself in its delivery, and then turns inside out and destroys... this has the makings of a great Jordan Peele film. I want to read The Sernox from the beginning again, all in one sitting, and feel the entire, soaring and then crashing arc.
Pulling out all the stops here, Nathan. "In the weeks before my demise..." hold on a minute, what a clever way to begin the ending. Bleak, dark, relentless. As it must be. In a word: Fascinating.