Correlation, causation, right? Not linked. So get your mind out of the gutter.
My mind was, of course, wallowing in the filth as I drifted in and out of sleep, my head rolling into improbably painful positions, my mouth ringed with a thin patina of shame. Or drool. (Same difference). In that meandering state between sleep and dream, nothing is quite real, nothing is quite dream. They call that a liminal state, right?
I was thinking about this one look. It was a look a lover had given me once. They'd reached that point where their restrictions had been peeled off like a layer of paint. Nothing in the world can ever compete with that look of starved depravity, a mixture of pleading, supplication, and oddly, dominance.
I played it again and again in my mind. It had been years, but that one moment remained etched in my memory as if in some indelible marker, as all other times, places and faces were slowly worn away. A clicking, rattling, whirring sound in the cabin snapped me out of that eternal moment. I didn’t know what it was, and for a while I could keep it out of mind. I was replaying those moments, the delicious moments before everything turned to shit. Yet the moment was slowly losing out. I could feel scratchy things, hungry things, scuttling around in the machinery of the bus. It wasn't sexy hungry. It was, rather, cold, empty insect hunger. I could feel them inside there. Lurking. Waiting.
The air started to smell, I don’t know. It just smelled off. A chemical smell, like DMT or magic markers. I gave up. There were no more "eager mouths," or "nubile mounds" or anything like that. Just a beehive buzzing, mechanical bees, razor sharp bees. Growing, choking out the air, blotting out the sun. I opened my eyes.
This was the first I noticed that someone was seated beside me. Kind of weather-worn looking guy, he had a young face but was also covered in a pattern of wrinkles like kidskin.
“Do you smell that?”I asked him.
“Huh? Smell what?” he asked. He seemed distracted by something else, but I was still mostly fixated on the chemical smell and what sounded like Einsturzende Neubauten trapped inside the air ventilation system.
“Nevermind,” I said. I saw a sign drift past. 300 miles to New Orleans. Loooong ride ahead. “So where you from?” I asked.
He got this 1000 mile stare, like a guy that’d been in the trenches too long. “All over,” he said. “I was in Babylon.”
“Hm, the band that’s been in the news?”
"Everyone's dead now," he said, giving me a look I'd never seen.
And that’s about when the hyperdimensional merovignian bees started crawling out of the ventilation system.
My mind was, of course, wallowing in the filth as I drifted in and out of sleep, my head rolling into improbably painful positions, my mouth ringed with a thin patina of shame. Or drool. (Same difference). In that meandering state between sleep and dream, nothing is quite real, nothing is quite dream. They call that a liminal state, right?
I was thinking about this one look. It was a look a lover had given me once. They'd reached that point where their restrictions had been peeled off like a layer of paint. Nothing in the world can ever compete with that look of starved depravity, a mixture of pleading, supplication, and oddly, dominance.
I played it again and again in my mind. It had been years, but that one moment remained etched in my memory as if in some indelible marker, as all other times, places and faces were slowly worn away. A clicking, rattling, whirring sound in the cabin snapped me out of that eternal moment. I didn’t know what it was, and for a while I could keep it out of mind. I was replaying those moments, the delicious moments before everything turned to shit. Yet the moment was slowly losing out. I could feel scratchy things, hungry things, scuttling around in the machinery of the bus. It wasn't sexy hungry. It was, rather, cold, empty insect hunger. I could feel them inside there. Lurking. Waiting.
The air started to smell, I don’t know. It just smelled off. A chemical smell, like DMT or magic markers. I gave up. There were no more "eager mouths," or "nubile mounds" or anything like that. Just a beehive buzzing, mechanical bees, razor sharp bees. Growing, choking out the air, blotting out the sun. I opened my eyes.
This was the first I noticed that someone was seated beside me. Kind of weather-worn looking guy, he had a young face but was also covered in a pattern of wrinkles like kidskin.
“Do you smell that?”I asked him.
“Huh? Smell what?” he asked. He seemed distracted by something else, but I was still mostly fixated on the chemical smell and what sounded like Einsturzende Neubauten trapped inside the air ventilation system.
“Nevermind,” I said. I saw a sign drift past. 300 miles to New Orleans. Loooong ride ahead. “So where you from?” I asked.
He got this 1000 mile stare, like a guy that’d been in the trenches too long. “All over,” he said. “I was in Babylon.”
“Hm, the band that’s been in the news?”
"Everyone's dead now," he said, giving me a look I'd never seen.
And that’s about when the hyperdimensional merovignian bees started crawling out of the ventilation system.
yeah i think i heard some whisperings of hyperdimensional merovignian bees, somewhere...
ReplyDeleteyou know, whispered... coded rumors
the man with the nitrous tank was talking about them
mentally, of course
when he asked me if i knew about the merovignians