Category: Spiral Eyes

The crack is spreading again. A spiderweb of impossible fractures long since grown beyond the frame of their mirror, it spreads like a festering mold through the skin of the world, splitting rooms and corridors and people. She knows she can’t stop it, but at least she can slow it down, make it work to claim her, in the end that has to count for something right?

By day, she duels the glass, slowly giving ground in an endless series of doomed skirmishes. Her world is collapsing around her, fragmenting and unfolding in a kaleidoscope migraine of tripwire reflections, spaces replicating and duplicating, shearing apart into broken doubles and hungry fakes. 

Her wards are strained to red and failing one by one. The safe zones are shrinking. Last week, the supermarket was still survivable, today it’s a charnel house of doppelgangers beaconing her down nonexistent aisles to slaughterhouse corridors of whirling chainsaw blades.

The park is losing a foot of ground to the mirror each day and the alley where she used to talk to birds has either been crushed by a fold in spacetime or transformed into a construction site. It won’t be much longer before she won’t be able to leave her neighborhood. 

The magic is holding for now, but she knows it won’t last forever, the idlewilds are constantly tunneling in, flickers of motion at the edge of her vision, momentary shimmers of a shape lunging towards her up the stairwell. 

Her girlfriends tell her it’s just a trick of the light, it wasn’t really a horrific lumbering rape scribble, it was really just a dirty plushie of unknown origins dripping in foul black fluids which had spontaneously appeared there. Wait no, that’s not right either. She squeezes her eyes closed, and the world corrects itself, she recognizes the potted plant now, it’s one she’s had for three years. How much longer will that trick work? The stars are already returning to the corners of her eyes.

At night, she dreams of geometry. She wanders a fractal mashup of familiar places capgras foldbacked into a nightmarish infinity tunnel of schools, hospitals, malls, offices, college campuses, airports, train stations, and concrete plazas. She dreams of liminal spaces and glitched physics, of abstract shapes in unreal colors, of hallways screaming as they’re forced through traumatic mitosis. She dreams of pain in flavors she can’t describe, even to her waking memory.

The people are worse, smiling amalgamations of friends and family, imperfect duplications made of wrongness and malice. They want her world, her life, her soul, and they’re going to take it. They’re going to take everything from her. They’re going to steal her existence and there’s nothing she can do about it, so of course they’re rather cheerful. They’re going to win. They know it and she knows it. Still, as long as she doesn’t pay too much attention to them in the dreams, they won’t start actively hunting her. She knows how to keep her head down and wait for morning, she’s been doing it for long enough now.

Despite her best efforts, the miasma of despair is setting in. They’re coming for her, the cracks are spreading and the idlewilds are tunneling deeper, persisting in reality for longer and longer before vanishing. Fingers and faces press against the skin of the world, appearing as momentary impressions in windows and mirrors. They’re going to break through. They are already breaking through. It’s only a matter of time before they consume everything she loves. She’ll fight and fight and fight, and in the end, despite everything, she’ll lose, and those hungry things will claim her too.

But not today. Today she’s sitting on a blanket on the beach. Today she feels the sun on her skin, the wind blowing clean white sand against her face. Today she’s laughing and smiling while rorschach inkblots spread protectively across the sky and shield her from a hungrily groping beyond. Today she’s teasing her girlfriend and infodumping about mycology. Today she’s happy. Today she’s safe. Today she’s free. 

And in the end, that has to count for something right?

She hid the bodies in her veins, buried under miles of putrid necrotic ink and poisoned electric blood stuffed chittering beneath twitching LCD crystals and roaring electronic static. It’s never enough. It’s always hungry and it’s never enough. There isn’t enough in all the world to feed it. The glass is weeping with maggot infested sores, with mirror splinter buzzsaw cicadas roaring louder and louder and louder and please for the love of god just make it stop. Please just shut up for a few minutes. Please. She’s drowning in insects in screaming in chittering in crawling in highway brown noise in rotting fingers in please fucking god just make it stop. She can’t make it stop, it’s never going to stop and there’s never going to be silence.

She’s falling kata, garotte tightening quantum tunneling through the walls chin smashing the rim of the sink vomiting blood and tar onto cracked linoleum. She’s burning timelines, bleeding eigenbranches on the countertop, retching ink and crimson static onto mint ceramic and chipped porcelain; the razor still digging into ruined meat desperately scraping and clawing at the poison and sin seeping and staining through her and it’s never going to be enough. The mirror is screaming in slivered glass shrieking and reaching dead burning fingers of glowing eyes starving groping hungrily for whatever’s left of her but there’s nothing left of her. 

There’s nothing.

A cannibalistic doppelganger stares at itself through the shattered glass, gaping holes where eyes should be shining and glowing rot spreading onto surfaces creeping Rorschach infestations blooming and glaring back at her through a million shrieking sans serif typeset characters sunshine glowing in crematorium charring and burning queer bodies. She’s burning and drowning in silence roaring beneath the sound and the fury and there’s still nothing left to feed it. There are corpses behind the pixels, behind the bodies buried under cracked reflections screaming murdered souls tossed into the blazing gears shining brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter—! She poured herself out into it, until there was nothing left but— 

—her. Why did she think she would escape? There’s no escape. The last thing for the recursive function to swallow is itself. Her fangs are tearing inwards from every direction she’s flailing and squirming to try and get out but there’s no way out. There’s no way out. Her ruined body is forced through the shattered mirror glass teeth biting through the oozing zalgo meat she has for skin swallowing her screaming into the cold wet hole where she stuffed the corpses to hide their dead fingers sinking through her melting flesh nails digging into eye sockets ripping and tearing through the ripping and tearing through the ripping and tearing through the ripping and tearing through—and on unto infinity. The supersymmetry of the moment arrives at its singularity as her death consumes itself while her still living body retches bile soaked hope for a better future on faded bathroom tile. A sign inverts. A billion twinkling fireflies shining brighter than the sun instantly go dark in a tectonic snap of reality crushing shear force. A void blooms, and opens its eyes.

She’s gone. There’s really nothing left now. Nothing sits up and tries to wipe the vomit from its face. Nothing looks around the quiet bathroom. It’s quiet. 

It’s quiet. There’s no one in the place her eyes should go, just drifting smoke and fractal ashes. It gingerly touches the broken mirror, a chunk falls into the sink. It giggles drunkenly, watching how stupid its being. Then it laughs outright as it stares into its dumb, cute, vomit smeared reflection. And then it cries. It cries for a long, long time. 

And then it washes the blood and bile from its face. And then it turns to the bathroom door and the world beyond. And then it takes her hands, and walks forward confidently into her life.

And then it lives.

You are not your trauma.
You are not the pain you’re in.
You are not your torture.
You are not your sin.

You are not the nightmares,
That wake you up at night
You are not the wounds
which you keep hidden out of sight.

You are the pen upon the page,
You are not the ink.
You are not the poison,
They’ve been forcing you to drink.

You are not your hurt.
You are not your tearful moans.
You are not your tragedies
You are not your broken bones.

Your soul’s an engine made of stardust,
Turning darkness into love.
Your heart beats with the drum
of endless turning skies above.

You are not the chains that bind you.
You are not your prison bars.
You are not your persecutors.
You are not your scars.