Fainting/Christmas in August
I need to evangelize my heart, to open up the sinews and fibers along the blushing hallways of varicose and red and shovel them into a box for display. The inside of my chest and upper stomach is constantly flying away from the rest of my body and then switching, in an instant, to sinking like a millstone hung over it and into the depths of the sea. It's an empty street with cars passing by but not seeing what's on the sidewalk. The trees that line a median built into the road-- red leaves that sparkle and dance in the sunlight, they spin like tops and glisten with white that twinkles like your brightest star. I want to feel the heat wash over my face and pop my veins and arteries with brute force as the radiation fills my skull and starts to burn holes into the front of my head. They're black and burnt and measurements of gore come flying out from them and are sucked into the air where they linger like dew drops suspended in a world without gravity or time. My eyelids are melted away into a thick and coagulated goop that sloshes down my face like tears and stains my clothes. My eyeballs roll out and hit the floor and now I am just some blind thing, some nothing nowhere to receive pity dollars on the side of the road resting next to the dancing trees. It's like I'm inside of a dream. I can't tell where anything ends anymore, time seems to just go on forever in a heat wave. I was together with an angel in the beginning of the world and the fragment of my heart that can detect the echoes of Heaven begs to be returned to her. It's not like blue skies and white clouds or gates of gold, no, it's something else. There's dark and there are shooting stars blasting and roaring in every direction. Below your feet, above your head, across the infinity of an open void. Balls of raging hot flame penetrate through the sky like bullets and every second your hearing is gone and your eyes are squinting from the luminescence beyond your comprehension. It's not painful but it's like falling. You're in a constant free fall that never takes you to the ground but fills your blood with the sensation of terminal velocity and the gasping dragging feeling of standing at the very very edge of a cliff and looking down, like you can barely just balance where you are. Her body is coated in rusty red armor that flashes and glows in the reflection of the chaos around you. Red, almost a pink. It's like frozen blood encases her as she stands next to you and touches your neck with her razor cold hands. Her hair a forest fire to shroud your fainting heart from the particles of toxic halogens that rain from the tails of the stars that pass across every inch of your sky. It's terrifying, it's the most terrified I've ever been. I'm in love. From the little rays left behind in the black nothing that sparkle for an instant before dying off forever, she reaches out and forms a crown like a wreath. It's like a vine and for leaves are bulbs of light, brighter than a star--formed, themselves, from the stars-- that ungulate a yellowy-orange light and coats your face in that same radiated heat that is almost unbearable and causes sickness. And like a fever dream, she places the crown on my head to bathe me in a sugar light of hard heat and vibrating agony. It's a perfect scene, at the end of all of time, to last forever inside of a weary and weightless heart.
~~~
The wind howling outside sharp and dark. The days are shorter and shorter and nights grow longer like a tent cover over a cloudy sky. Inside of buildings are wreaths, gently placed and arranged in an order that gives the hallways and aisles of drug store, of coffee shops, of supermarkets a festive feeling. Over the speakers plays familiar Christmas music and brightens the soul.
Coming out from a store the air hits your face as a baseball of needles thrown at you. The instant chill and wake up of the sub freezing and empty lung rotting air goes into your throat and ice cubes across the side of your esophagus. The chill of the breeze blowing across the layers of piled snow solidifies your blood and moves you forward quickly-- it causes a jump start for your senses. Like voltage from a car battery zapping you in sparks and tingles of white. The gray sky is a mirror of the gray floor and the white of the snow-- if there's enough of it-- burns your corneas leaving sunspots.
It's an empire of white, flattened and crumbling across plateaus of light and airy snow, drier than a desert. The shadow of the sky reflects on where it's fallen from it's position on the ground to show little canyons and valleys, just slightly grayer than white. There are no bugs, no sounds. Silent as a grave.
There is a little boy bundled so tight he can barely move his arms from the diagonal angle they're stuck at by his sides. He is in full regalia-- hat, coat, boots, scarf, gloves. Layers and layers to fight against the northwind chill that brings down birds from the sky and covers plants in translucent glassy frost. Ice sickles bend down and almost sideways across the brown bottom of his roof. They glow with sparkles, like diamonds of infinite reflection shewing lenses and kaleidoscope inside of them.
He drags a small sled to a quiet hill several blocks away. In the biting cold he shivers but his purpose drives him on. He knows how much fun it will be on the hill. He has been there before and beneath his scarf covering his mouth like a surgical mask he breaks a toothy grin.
At the hill, after trudging through the resistance of mounds upon mounds of powdery snow, he lets off. Down from the hill and to the bottom, crouched on the wood framed sled and he lets out an almost yodel on the way down. The wetness of the snowy air belts across his face like a icy slap but it doesn't deter him.
He drags the sled to another spot, off to the side of the hill. On the way down this time he feels a buckle and a thud before he's unseated from his sled and thrown head first into the well preserved snow. He gets up and sees a mass right in front of his sled. It is black and large, before completely covered by the snow and now exposed to the shrouded sky. As he goes over he sees in the shape; a man. Crouched and huddled. He has long since frozen solid. On his body are tattered fragments of clothes, his skin has blistered and turned swollen blue. The coagulated blood from his fetid corpse has sunken to his fingers and feet, turning them a sickening purple and black. "He looks like a sausage" thinks the boy. His teeth are yellow and his eyes have closed, frozen completely shut, the ice from the cakey snow pinched together at the eyelashes. There is no readable expression on the man's face. He is just laying there, no longer as a person but as some thing that used to be a person. Now nothing and nowhere, outside of time and with no space to even rest. The pillars of ice born from the inside of his nose ran down and froze again with streaks of red and snot lining the clear ice like veins and arteries.
The boy goes home. He never says anything about the corpse and he never hears anything about it either. At night he looks out the window at the Christmas lights adorning the houses on his street, their lights cascading off of the silent snow that grows higher and higher every night, covering up more and more of the earth.