audrey

recount the memories of dying stars, and witness their final breaths.

STARGAZER out now.

—

a cloudy beach, sun hanging behind a thick marine fog; cold, pallid, perpetually suspended over the distant ocean, a shore which ebbs and flows, crashing and receding in irregular rhythms, endless grey swathes rotting and lifeless; an unrelenting swell of recycled viscera, pale blood and shredded organs, bone fragments smoothed into sea stones deposited in the sand composing the rocky shore, embedded into jagged cliffs which tower over the distant sands, no end in sight, broken up only by the bodies, the endless piles of bodies suffocating the shore, piles and piles of corpses self-mutilated in every way, all in various stages of decay, condemned to the wastes by their own hands, the hands of a girl, trapped in her own Hell, sitting apathetic in the dunes, refusing to acknowledge the bodies, her bodies, her unending sins stacked taller than the cliffs preventing her leave, stretching further than the ocean refusing her rest, a cage she built to hide within, to ignore the greatest sins of all; the ones that left her crying and pounding her fists into the coarse sand until the white of her bone shone through all the blood, blood that was quickly lapped up by the sea, quickly incorporated into the sickening miasma that rolled over the sand and spat into the air a mist that made the girl vomit, sickening, so sickening, and the dry heaving did nothing to stop the nausea so she choked into the shoreline, for hours it felt like, her lines of spit drawing words into the sand that she swears had meaning, only she hadn't the mind to make out what, and so she screamed; long agonized cries of anger and guilt and some other thing she couldn't place, and she screamed until her lungs collapsed and her vocal cords were as shredded as her bleeding hands, what was left of her lungs filling with salt, a scarce whistle blowing through her teeth, salt lungs teeth, salt lungs teeth; the words repeating in her mind like the incessant buzz of cicadas, only worse, it was her dead voice repeating it, salt lungs teeth, as if the words had any meaning and weren't the agonal spasms of a mind filled with too much to bear; salt lungs teeth, salt lungs teeth, SALT LUNGS TEETH, until she died under the weight of those meaningless words,

and found her first body washed ashore,

pale and bloated,

and she watched each new body rise with the waves and spread across the level sands,

bloody teeth dripping into the sink, and plucking scales to reveal raw pink skin beneath. haircare consisting of cutting matted locks off with shards of broken glass. more blood in the sink, bitten lips oozing something that tastes cold and soft, blanketing the tongue with equal parts comfort and concern. skincare is ever incessant, fast-growing thick hair and iridescent scales that cut through epidermis and feathers that leave pits of blood and more cold ooze leaking out and dripping down her arms and legs, a kaleidoscope of red and pink spattering against the floor and walls. her bones form rigid edges beneath her pale, delicate skin and every time she stretches, her scars crack and peel, reminding her that they are never fully healed and never will.

she takes a shower to wash away all the blood and dead skin and she watches it stain the cracked and yellowed porcelain. she coughs up some chromatic fluid and it reminds her that nothing in her body is human anymore. she is scarred skin stretched over muscle shifting around organs only seen in the corpses of chimeric angels washed ashore. she is herself, contained and constricted by a cracking rib cage of solid-light bones that hum and glow when she sleeps. there is something Other inside her. something she does not want to know.

my first game STARGAZER is releasing on itch.io within the next week

a cosmic looking simulator about dying stars and dreamlike memories

—

I've never been to a beach but I know this place well. There is a dead whale washed ashore, bones poking from wet flesh. It isn't rotting, it is an ecosystem. Flesh births anew, its skin feeding polyps with fins and hooves and feathers growing incessantly, bloated with serous fluid and the tears of dead things—corpses, sitting between monolithic ribs. Blessings for the hungry.

I don't know if I am dead, the polyps look at me with crystal eyes, irises of all shapes suspended in opaline. I cannot tell if it is hunger or recognition in their gaze.