Psycho
Psychotic. A label that gripped me tight as a noose. I felt deranged, feral, my mental state devolving into an apathetic beast consumed by lunacy. It blossomed in my mind like a putrid rose.
It felt like an image of pristine violence and vivid splashes of crimson blood and white dead eyes written on a blank cream page in dull black ink. Deeper than description, cut harder than a feeling. It was raw primal emotion. Pure energy in a clear crystal case with a little placard on it saying do not touch, only look. Lightning, hot and fast, sputtering out of a length of frayed copper wire. The inner animal, locked deep and strong, surging at the chains that held it. Thick black links, dripping poison and black fumes, so that the world distorted and all that you could see were the eyes, the big, circle eyes like headlights on a truck, a truck right on top of you, and you, stuck there like a deer, just waiting to die whilst staring into the deep, soulless depths of your twisted desires.
It is then the mind dies. You feel yourself, the part of yourself you know as you, fall backward – the hand slips off the steering wheel – Fall, fall, fall, like an echo, into a deep black pit you never knew existed. A space big enough to swallow whole the universe, hidden within your mind. All the while you see the eyes, the eyes of hell and hate and fury stare down at you, their hand on the wheel now. Your body simply falls, limp like a broken marionette. A silent scream rolls through the dark.
Your body drops the bloody knife.
They say it’s the moments of weakness that define you. The bad mistakes. The missed opportunities. The cute girl you never said hello to. The interview you passed up on. The third grade math test you didn’t study for because a new cartoon was on. Well, maybe not so much, maybe not at all. It might just have been the nights spent whimpering in the corner. Sobbing, contorted, coiled like a rat in the dark.
A light would, did, break you.
It might even have been the hot sharp pain of tears on a cold cut cheek as the heavy leather licked at your back. Maybe it was the gagging sensation of liquor pouring up your nose, your face pressed against the wooden table. The sharp backhand which draws you back into the folds of reality only to feel your nose snap in half, and so, slip into the murky realm of unconsciousness.
Bullshit. It’s the weak choices. The shy and awkward teen that never did enough, never really tried because he was too nervous to do anything. It was then the voices started. Ghosts of regret that whispered in your tortured dreams. A glimpse of a life you could have had. It’s the ghosts that wake the animal, that spirit deep within your soul that only lives for fear and pain. Once it wakes, life is an endless nightmare. Life is a struggle not to rip the beating heart from the laughing world around you and eat it raw for ignoring you, torture it for not caring for you, leave naked, bloodied and afraid in a cold dirty cell for simply making you.
It is the bad days that the visions begin to cloud your reality. Your laughter gets louder, your smile brighter, but every day, every day you feel yourself slipping. It won’t be long until you’re sleeping at the wheel. Not long until your eyes only see walking corpses, and a world of chaos and fire. All is a dead burning wasteland, all except you. Now you sit atop a throne of bones, laughing at some perfect joke. The ghosts of regret are dead now, the last one who tried to whisper to you, you strangled with your own bare hands, you nut you, just squeezed until it stopped whimpering.
Whimpering, batting at your face, the puffy swollen lips trying to part, but you can’t understand what she is trying to say. So you shake her neck a bit harder, and the corpse starts to make a limp gurgling noise. You loved her, you idiot.
It’s not my fault. Not my fault I’m ugly, scarred and mean. I didn’t choose to be this way. Something, someone made me like this. Some twisted fucker whose idea of a joke this is, who thinks this is a life fit for living. I’m the one who has to live with being fucking unlovable.
‘Unlovable’, that did it. The soul can only take so much. The animal didn’t even have to fight. The chains just fell off, the final surrender.
Ice runs through your veins. Like hot lead poured down your throat, but you’re still screaming as your voice spews fire and pain. When your soul dies, it is as if she has anesthetized your body, and you watch her cut you open with a scalpel, then slowly chew on your beating heart. Your black and mangled heart. The maker’s initials carved in jagged letters glaring at you as she takes a bite, black bile dripping from her mouth over the red and broken neck.
You know who made you. As you fall, you think about what made you what you are. As your mind sinks into the pit, you watch the animal stab and stab and stab again. Taste the droplets land in your mouth. Tastes like copper. Tastes like steel, the iron of a thousand swords that sever a thousand crying heads. Of gunpowder in the air, a scent of motor oil and napalm purging flesh. The taste of freedom, all in the blood. Freedom not to care. Free to slip into the void untarnished and laugh as the animal does all you always dreamed but never, ever would do. Coward.
You laugh as the knife clatters to the floor. You haven’t even killed the pathetic, bleeding mess of shit that was what made you. Instead, just watch it crawl over its entrails to the phone. You laugh because the animal has a brilliant idea as it pulls its belt off, then slowly, very slowly, whips the bloody mess. 911 yells into the dead receiver. You laugh as you fall, and the laugh echoes in the emptiness. Not you anymore, no, something else. You are lost, adrift in the vast eternity of the mind.
Back in reality, your body sits hunched and bloody in the corner, laughing.
Andre Hirschler 