Prose
by Jeremiah DeJesus
by Jeremiah DeJesus
There is such a thing as the “flow state” for creatives and scholars. When tapped into and supped, there isn't any better feeling. Words and themes and images and thoughts, normally adjacent and floating and coalescing around each other, come together and run out through a steady stream. The passionate faucet that makes you feel alive.
On and off.
I would say that is my main difficulty. How I would love to break the spigot, wrench it on and on forever, but I'm human, and it loves being off. Staving away from a flood when the sink is world-big.
I am the Sisyphus of words: building and rolling and straining in my dreams and waking life, but when I reach the top, down the ball drops. It is heavy, my wants. Can I allow it to crest the top, over the hill, and onto the page, onto flat land for everyone to see? What if this boulder I've been pushing is actually really ugly, what if it isn't really round but has points and sides and angles I missed in all my deadly effort? And so, it rolls all the way to the bottom, back where I started. And up again you go.
Feeling the weight, complex and so exciting, words on a page, my history exhumed and printed–every word I write is a statement to time, the classic “I WAS HERE” on a tombstone. Each of my graves’ a page blowing in the wind. Each page a grave. And truly? I need to die by them.
I'm working on dying—on entering that “flow state” beyond the waking realm. Sometimes I feel like I'm dying, and then I feel like I'm drowning in my world’s sink. But I only need to breathe. You can't push if you aren't breathing. And so I inhale and exhale. Inhaling, my skills I hold close from birth. Exhaling, and exhaling is the hard work (just like asthma), exhaling through the pressures and rushing outside circumstances that don't care that you just want to move your hands. Exhaling through sharp breaths to speak out. But every breath is essential to chugging on.
It's sharing oxygen with others. It's the next leg over the pew, helped by an eager push. You can't trip. You can't ignore it. You push, just as eagerly, just as your teammates push. And in the end, you push together until your wheels are moving—even when your car isn’t, and scientifically, things are heaviest when they are still—and they never stop. You roll that boulder, and you convince yourself not to jump out of the way when it tumbles back down. You get crushed by it, you tumble along with it, because it is then you realize it isn't smooth and it's got little vertices and even holes to patch. You call your teammates over because man, oh man, going down the hill was a rush–scary–but so illuminating, and you’ve seen things you never had before. Things that flail and cry, and your teammates help you nurse it back to health.
And then you roll it back up again, but this time, when you reach the top, with a helpful push, the sun is shining and the boulder’s slick from effort; it looks nothing like what you thought it would. And there are dozens–hundreds of hills, big and small, off in the distance, with boulders of all shapes and sizes, just waiting for you to muster a push. And then you slide down this hill, right to the next, and you don't actually feel like dying at all.
"He never found home, but he found a door. No keys, no locks, no guards, no knobs, no roads—just an entrance, a pull, and a frame."
SPEAKERS HUMMED BEYOND THE WALLS, a low buzz crawling over stone like static on skin. Shadows twitched and snaked along stark, spartan walls, guided by the sickly glow of a waspy light bulb. The air was stained—washed artificially pale, in tides, as if seeping time.
In the corner, by the door, a woman stood, her uniform sharp. She had no face and no eyes, her helmet absorbing light around it like a void. Its shape was new to him, or old rather, like an earlier life—when motorbikes were just two rubber wheels and an aerodynamic chassis, stripped for speed and nothing else, bare and deceptive. It blurred in streaks, only the windowed visor’s faint glint to mark her being. Her arms folded across her chest, but her leg jittered a restless rhythm she couldn’t keep down. Like she was ready to run, or fight. Like words on her hidden lips.
He stepped through the door, uneven on his feet and hands clammy. Behind, the door exhaled, shutting him in.
“What is it Drobbie?”
“My name is Dropbox Soldier Kim,” she said. Her goal was subtle, and she wanted to be here even less than he. “You will stand at attention and address me by my proper title—General Gage.”
Gage’s knuckles tightened. Words misted to silence, tasting like frost on glass, and trapped in curled fog. Her black-flame helmet moved. He clicked his heels and saluted, chest tight and a burning in his lungs.
“At ease,” she said. She was near enough to touch. A gloved hand rose—paused—then slid beneath her uniform. The thick chest plate was a shell, like crustaceans. The standard uniform reminded him of small, benign, black lies—with a plain deception he couldn’t pity—sheltered in armor, protecting their false, useless insides. Hard and safe on any night out until caressed and beckoned to open, its calm face blood-kissed like lipstick. With that distinct smell they’d never get out no matter how many washes or miles battered by dusty burnouts.
She cleared her throat like an apology. “We thought… it only right it be you,” she said.
She drew a revolver. It gleamed in the sickly light—a relic. It was slim and sleek. Its barrel housing held a pattern of tiny skulls, each one carved with chilling care, like frozen faces of the damned forever trapped in steel. It had been cleaned, then polished and painted a dull chrome. Stealing its chaotic champagne coat before they took it. Turned in like his title.
She held it out, like ice, burning and bright. It sat in his hand, melting, like the weight of an unspoken promise—heavy, familiar, and wrong. Holding it again hurt.
“Where’d you get this?” he said.
She walked past him, his questions left behind. At the exit, she lingered.
See first ten pages here:
BEEP
DRRRRRRR
—The cavern was a prison of sound.
CHATTER
BEEP
—The sound held, waiting.
BEEP!
—Pulses quickened.
DRRRRRCKKK!
—The drill bit began its last, tearing cry.
AND THEN THE WORLD BROKE.
CRRRAAAACCKKKK!!!
WHOOSH!
An instant: a terrifying suction.
BOOM!!!!
The bore dropped with a sickening, internal jolt.
SPRRRRT!
SPRRRRRRRRRT!
Steam erupted from the treads.
WHAIL!
DRCKCKCK!
SCREEE!
SCREREREREEE!
Noise became a siren, thin and panicked.
SHHHHH!
Air pressure stabilized.
SPRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTT!
Stressed metal clenched.
SHHHHHHHHH!
The lingering, hissing sigh of the cavern.
CLUNK!
—Finality.
“WE’VE HIT QUICKSAND!” an engineer yelled, pale-eyed and petrified. His voice, raw and tiny, was swallowed by the sandy growl of the treads, kicking away from ruin. Sand batted at the yellow hull of the large science bore, caressing it home. Earth’s kiss as old as time. Sirens drowned out the panic when emergency lights flooded the interior. Computer nodes on circuit boards bathed in flashing reds and blues to the rhythm of the most primal warning. Lab coats and military equipment spurred in anxiety, the people attached to them far from mannequin; they had fallen, a dozen feet below the map, and watched their only hope of escape, chewed.
“Shit!” Marshak cursed. He pushed through the tangle of people. On the exterior of the machine, the main door slammed open, along with Marshak’s bald head blinking and searching, his head touched by the billowing steam of stalled treads. The cavern was bright—blinding even—but that was to be expected when lava replaces water this deep underground.
Marshak’s monocle slid upon his nose as he looked down at the hungry earth. His sweat built by the buckets from the cavern’s heat, his pores producing the bore’s tears as they hit the hull and sizzled, its body inching closer to calamity. The treads sank at a speedy pace. Marshak’s hop from the sizable machine to safe ground was soon to be one of the last possible. He exited, his quick inspection confirming that not everyone would make it out in time.
Oh well.
“We are truly stuck,” Marshak thought, his curse lingering in the hot air. What a contraption of junk! All that and it’s too HEAVY! This damnable machine, designed to find the core, rejected by the Earth's surface. A failure of control.
“Sir!” a scientist shouted in feeble awe, eyes pinpricks. They stared at something behind Marshak. Marshak ignored him; he was worried about things more pertinent than any of his subordinate ants. The quicksand moved with an appetite, eventually swallowing the bore and the screaming scientists who couldn’t make it out in time. Their lives eaten whole.
Although nothing quite mattered to Marshak anymore—We’re stuck down here, with no way up—the military personnel, all of whom had made safe exits from the craft, standing at attention ready for his next command, made him feel a paltry form of security. He felt no remorse for the scientists left on the chopping block. While everyone was going die, at least it would be by hunger or oxygen and not something dumb like quicksand or bored—
“S-Sir! Please!”
Marshak was a scientist at heart. Truly, he was regarded as one of the most accomplished scientists to ever exist… If only every other scientist wasn’t so dumb in comparison, he wouldn’t see them as complete failures and nuisances. Masked leeches and blood suckers.
They didn’t understand the Earth like Marshak. They didn’t understand the occult. The hard—oh so hard—things he’d done to further human understanding of their only home.
The extent of his search was not for the light of mind, and the heart mattered little to Marshak. Scrappy attempts of young love treated with emotional brevity and a month-long self-imposed experiment on the permeability of the vena cava led to his eternal possession of a, also self-created, hearthumper. The human body is folly for Marshak. A pattern of selfish thought. He had enough accountability to acknowledge his shining narcissism. And if he wasn’t so selfish he’d give all his limbs away. His torso too. To whom or what, never crossed Marshak’s mind, for that, he would always keep.
For the mind, the most complex machine, he’d give it all and do it all. Harvest and grind the flesh of these mercenaries to satiate the bubbling hunger that will rise like magma from the earth. Teeth like pits of falling, closing, and sharp speech. No words spoken as his soul leaves his throat, breaking the link between him and this plane, but never this world. This world, this planet—was his only possession.
But was it ever his?
What do you call a home that houses others?
Yours, mine, theirs, ours. A family, a neighbor, a rival, an enemy.
A place.
What did it mean to belong, when you had no home?
Marshak’s mind was his only home, and yet, it housed him.
It just wasn't possible for everyone to belong in the same home.
So, Marshak struck out to find that crucial door, cut from the core, and seal it shut. While his mind searched for a lost lock and key.
When the scientist made another noise, Marshak’s monocle gleamed in the light of the cavern, and his face tightened. His hand reached for his waist, a bulky nuisance, and in smooth fashion he spun out a revolver—stubby and precise, like its owner—and blasted the scientist’s head to bits.
“What!?” Marshak spat. White coats cowered to the floor; penguin tails tucked. Everyone with a gun aimed sights for the esteemed Dr. Mantekolu Marshak.
But Marshak had turned. Turned, frozen. His head lifted, shadows twisting on his face like he was in the warmth of a bonfire. Eyes locked skyward with ruinous growth dancing in his monocle.
Marshak couldn’t make sense of it. Its identity, its state of being, its roots, its basis. Where does it begin and where does it end. To where does it reach… What does it birth?
No words were spoken as they all gazed upon the phenomena. The scientist’s life gone and lost to memory. An impossibly large tree filled the cavern from foundation to ceiling. Branches punched through the dirty crust above, drilling hollows and weakening it. A bore-sized hole sat between a haphazard circle of the tree’s stretched arms, burning alive. The tree burned an active fire; flames growing and dancing and playing and guarding and teasing and leading and scheming and phasing until the tree was ethereally stable.
Marshak never believed in finding beauty. Beauty always found him. Beauty was the most natural course of evolution. Nothing was perfect and that made everything beautiful. There was always more to know about something, and that made it beautiful. Marshak fully understood that humans had exhausted themselves of their own essence. There was no beauty to find when humans were so… permeable. Truly holding nothing of essence. Nothing left for him to know.
Deep in his research was when beauty presented itself. With understanding comes beauty, but only when willing, and only after you’ve discovered the uglies.
So Marshak was one of a handful, to take the time and strictly look at things, to look at the reflections of the things people hardly ever did. That is why, he posited, that he hardly ever felt fear. Beauty was always just around the corner.
Or right in your face. And Marshak refused to be scared. Stunned drool running hills down to his neck as he admired the scene.
The cavern rumbled and rocked, and his sweat fled his face. As his focus blurred, he noted that the tree resembled a cross to the dizzy.
Up the gnarly lit wood, on the edges of the branches, lay human-shaped, grotesque fruits that blew a live fire. In and out, like balloons of temptation.
“Forbidden fruits,” Marshak breathed in disbelief.
He suffered no fear in the face of these outlandish fruits, in fact, he was incredibly curious about this impossibility. So, he mustered his mind. He ignored the pull on his soul. He ignored the lagging thump of his hearthumper. What did he have to lose? They were stuck anyway. This was beautiful. This was a sign.
A fruit fell from its cocoon with a grisly smack. Like a summoned beast, it scratched at the earth with harsh pants. Its fingers—fingers like a human, five on each hand and opposable thumbs—raked the ground as it rose to a hunch. Its lit legs buckling like a newborn. Searching for sustenance.
Marshak's teeth hurt, and then, he realized he was grinning. He wondered if they could talk, if they could think. Was this his door? His neighbors? A welcome…?
In dull sounds, the soldiers and scientists started a commotion. Words weighed less than observations to Marshak and the begging requests for a solution were shadowed by his curiosity for such a marvel. In the panic, more “fruits” fell to life. When those fruits sprouted up onto shaky legs… shots were fired.
Bullets rang from industrial machine guns. A deathly racket soaking the howl of something new. Something grand.
The bullets impacted everywhere, the soldiers in line like a firing squad. Only, when the bullets hit, they exploded. The fruits bursting and combusting until the entire cavern was a sea of white, swaying like the ocean. Everyone was thrown to the ground; some resting where they would forever lie with a stalagmite tombstone. Marshak was flung back as the cavern shook. Lava sloshed, humans cried, and the fruits shrieked.
They sang in blazing breaths. A hymn of hunger, of death. The hymn of hell.
Marshak’s ears bled from the tune. A sharp, disorienting pain. He stumbled to his knees, three dead bodies away from the base of the tree. Now, he finally felt that fear. That primal warning he should have heeded. He should have sunk to a sandy grave. Gave himself, willingly, to this place. Perhaps, then, he’d find a home.
His mind pained from the sight of what he saw through and beyond the tree. The elusive things he’d ceaselessly searched for… he never imagined it’d be so ugly. No beauty was exposed or presented through his monocle. His monocle was beauty itself in the reflection of the flames.
A reflection of himself: Marshak succumbed to his fear. His understanding whittled to sticks and carved into shavings of nothing. A succulent and ripe fruit, bright and blazing and burning and beating and raging for but a bite of the unknown. Swallowed whole by these hellish wants and hellish needs. A life snuffed before living but burning in death. He thinks, in this particular instance of true knowing, that he shines a hellishly beautiful spark, a big and bright glow, that if nothing else, makes him go down rotten when the fruit eats him.