#ionofalion

He calls, the echoes, insistent, insistent.

You wake, a little numb, but that itself is nothing new. Today, though, there is something different, a little itch within your hands. It stays with you through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Getting into bed does not improve it, and in fact, it feels like it is getting worse. You try to laugh it off, but still you cannot quite dismiss the thought: that you have always felt as though you had another soul inside, that each internal battle you have fought (from basic things, like what to eat, to whether physics is a viable career) was not a simple monologue; the voice with which you struggle long and hard is not your own. But this is just psychology, and nothing more.

The morning comes, and quite before you realize, your fingernails are scraping at your palms. They seem a trifle red, but otherwise unchanged. You shuffle over to the kitchen and attempt to make a soothing cup of coffee, but your fingers won’t cooperate. At last, by force, you flip the switch. You curse your hand, but glimpse the truth: that it is not at all to blame, that it is not an enemy, the one that you must overcome in order to regain control; that there is something underneath that thwarts and rails at each command that once you gave without a thought and treated as accomplished fact. But this is rampant craziness, you tell yourself, and nothing more.

But afternoon brings yet more ills, although for lunch you only ate a chicken caesar salad. No, it wasn’t that, and anyway, this isn’t indigestion, or your allergy to eggs, but more a pressure building from inside, a throbbing pain. Your office mate holds out some Advil, which you take but which you know, somehow, won’t work: for this is not a muscle ache, or else the slings and arrows of outrageous Time, but is instead (and this you tell your coworkers) a malady not physical but metaphysical. You’re not quite sure they still believe you, and they leave the Advil bottle out, but they are plainly stubborn and close-minded fools, and nothing more.

At length, however, you can work for not an endless minute more. They ask you if you need a ride, but you demur, for you need peace and quiet now. They don’t resist, but step aside as you walk out, each step a burden and a strain. You itch and soon feel fit to burst, imagining that even that might be relief (though not for real, you have no tolerance for pain). Instead, you pour yourself a glass, then two, and pray the numbness holds until sweet sleep takes over from the irritation of the day. The bed looks so inviting; you turn out the lights and sink beneath the sheets to settle in, and hope that this is just a twenty-four hour cold or flu, and nothing more.

You start awake to mostly black and pounding pain. You turn your head to see the glowing hands both point to twelve. Your skin feels tight and taut against your muscles, straining at the bit to burst right through into the open air, as though they feel that they would suffocate without their freedom from your flimsy cage. And now, at last, you realize— the heart that pulses in your chest is not your heart, the blood that flows within your veins is not your blood, the air you breathe is not your air, the food you eat, the cold you feel, and even to your memories— all these that once you thought your own are minions of an unborn twin, who chafed through years of darkness and bleak anonymity. No more.

And now it will not suffer one more second of ignominy, and draws your fingernails against its borders. And, although you know (as certainly as once you knew the laws of Newton or the taste of chocolate) that this is it, you feel a special ecstasy: the sharp, acidic taste of air upon your wounds, and there, beneath, another’s shield against the world; the liberating feel of light flung through a newborn’s eyes, there to perturb a web of heretofore quiescent nerves; and in response to that transcendant thrill, the tears that flow across a face that none has ever known. You bear your twin no enmity, for he had known but his own self, and nothing more.

The dawn is here, the pain is gone. The night, with its catharsis and its fever, cleansed you of your ills. You bound down to the kitchen, where you make yourself some coffee. And, you ponder, as you pour your cream, what difference a night can make, to go to sleep in suffering, and wake, amongst the morning rays, a brand new soul—

The organs rang out in clamorous harmony… An ode to silent horror in sound. Then it rained blood and all the animals drowned. Their bloated corpses float along the avenues. They float in from leaning, leafless woods. From windowless homes. Crows sit on the wires, chanting dirges, threnodies, and coarse, hoarse elegies. Indifferent and hungry. They wait patiently for the flood to subside. Scurrying like vermin, people in a godless psycophantic crawl.

Truth.