His Fingers Dripped Like Wax
Part One: A Dichotomy of Sun and Sea Reflected In the Needle’s Eye
The world spun and he spun plummeting down like like like himself hot wax melting over him like a coffin solidifying as he hits the water Lot’s wife brackish in his mouth saline in his veins and while the fall itself was an eternity the moment when the surface tension broke and he left the sky and entered the vinegar-dark sea is the one that drew tears from his eyes. Crushed down everything’s imploding while sterile-white feathers float to the surface in a funeral procession. By the time he hits the bottom silt exploding in constellations Cancer Libra Orion he is a casualty of war but he was drowned long before now and the silence is so overwhelming it ruptures eardrums.
Part Two: He Burns Like the Sun and Nostradamus Watches
His name is Julius or that is what they call his skin the one that has grown too tight and is dried and crinkled at the seams pale as Barium they say he is wasting away like the waning moon but they’re wrong and soon he will burst free and his real name will Echo like Narcissus. Today the news came to him through a telephone not the kind with a rotary and a rosary but the kind that steals one’s voice and plays it backwards to dial tone gods who will divine fortunes in radio static. Hello they said is this Mr. Flint and he said yes and they said you might want to sit down and he didn’t and then they told him that his house burned down and he said I don’t have a house I live in an apartment and they said not that one the one you lived in as a boy and he doesn’t remember what they said after that because a ringing noise not unlike starsong played in his head and the next thing he remembers he’s in his apartment boxed in bricked in oh Fortunato why are you so cruel? He is drawn to the flames not like a moth but like a witch approaching the stake but it doesn’t really matter since everyone goes up in flames ashes ashes we all
Part Three: Maps of Human Hair Speak Memory at Roadside Stations
He can fly at Mach Nine but there’s the inevitable fall even though he has no pride so he takes his car and the motor roars like a blinded Cyclops but Nobody is there to complain so he sets off. He’ll drive until time’s arrow lands and then he’ll be there and then what? He has technically owned the house while the Sun circled Earth several times but he’s never been there. His parents owned it once and he won’t think of that anymore not go past that exit he’s missed his exit.
Part Four: Kronos Consumes the Communion
He’s parked at a rest stop though he can’t rest and in constant motion like a hummingbird’s death throes he takes his food to a table by the window and eats Prometheus’ liver on a sesame seed bun puts extra ketchup packets into his pocket leaves again.
Part Five: The Echo of the Scream of the Ghost of the Crooked Little House That Jack Built
His car feels like Charon’s ferry bearing him to an afterlife composed of blood-and-Betadine scented childhood and crematory ash. The firebird will not be born here again its golden heart will lie among the embers until the four winds whip it all away. He walks in the ruins rubbing ash between his hands like chalk and the ghost of the house rises up around him its foundation supporting empty air its gable roof injecting the sky with virulent diseases. There are people staring like a chorus and he averts his eyes looks at the ground and there among the ruins he finds it in all its rusted glory among the brick fragments and broken microscope slides he finds it it’s still sharp it’s his father’s scalpel.
Part Six: The Splitting of Osiris
His youth flooded back to him as Deucalion’s box was opened. His Father built the labyrinth and his Mother was the Minotaur and Julius was left to wander corridors of anguish sometimes made of rusting industrial steel sometimes of damp stone sometimes of splintered wood sometimes of polished marble and while there were sometimes flickering fluorescent lights or dripping candles it was always dark dark dark and went on forever and they never did numb the pain. It started when he was attacked by a dog one with burrs in its fur and saliva on its face mauled until Julius was little more than a hot lump of flesh but he healed in a day holey wholly holy and that was nothing because then the torture began.
Part Seven: The Hypocritic Oath
They cut him open like a chrysalis until the butterfly paste oozed out and half-formed wings fell to the dirty tile floor. Banishing death with dissection breastbone to groin solar plexus under the ribs flaying for a Nobel cause for what’s one child in the path for eternal life? Julius retreated like low tide deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until he reached its lower strata where haruspice ran their fingers over his wounds and whispered in his ear his fortune he could not hear them over his mother and father seeking truth in the telomeres. Every day for he doesn’t know how many years before he took off his shirt one day at school because they were forcing him to go swimming even though he hated the water and his teacher gasped at the scar there for he could heal but he could not heal that and so they took him away but the sun had already set and the stigmata would not fade.
Part Eight: The Man Who Stared at the Sun Until Ra Replied
He stood in the ashy ruins of the labyrinth and stared up at the sun his pupils black holes sucking in its light. He was lost in the labyrinth which had never left him it lurked in the cracks in the wall in the white between letters in the coffee grounds at the bottom of his chipped cup. In his weakness it crawled upon him a millipede of impossible angles and infinite curves and it sucked him in and his feet bled and his waxen wings could gain no purchase on the sepulchral air and the ghosts of two minotaurs roamed here with horns like scalpels and if they found him he would be lost forever pickled in formaldehyde and left on a shelf gathering dust like stars. It was here he met himself so long ago it was here he donned his wings but he escaped only once and from that came fractal falls each one incomplete and branching vanes on a feather and he fell until he cried out for the labyrinth screamed for it prayed for it found himself back in it and realized the mistake he’d made. After that the labyrinth clipped his wings. He is losing himself again. He wails and people turn to look at him at the man in the middle of a burnt-down house and he turns to the sun and the sun reaches out rays to him as to a long-lost child and he stretches to reach it but a cloud passes over its face like the moon’s ghost jealous of the one that lets her glow. The labyrinth has sunk its teeth into his calf like a rabid dog on a playground he cannot break free he flounders in the wake of a ship that set sail without him he cannot he cannot he takes the scalpel clutched in his hand and drives it through his left eye.
Part Nine: In Waxen Hemispheres the Corpus Callosum Waits
People are screaming and it pierces him like a scalpel but there’s already a scalpel and it’s in him and in his blindness he sees the minotaur in broken robin’s egg scrubs holding the other end. Julius pushes the scalpel deeper and suddenly he tastes rosewater and the sea. He will not fly too high this time he knows that’s a lie for he must embrace the sun and be burned to nothingness like he never existed.
Part Ten: Postlude
Oh hubris an immortal cell line leads to living hell hello can you hear us Mr. Flint? He sits up smiles beatifically sunshine in his words: I didn’t fall.
Anna Rose Greenberg is a Virginia-based writer of weird fiction. Her work has appeared in Strukturriss, a journal of experimental fiction; Schlock! Webzine, a horror periodical; and her story in the horror publication Carnage House was later anthologized in The Best of Carnage House Year Two. She specializes in future worlds not quite our own, and nightmare landscapes populated by strange inhabitants of uncanny towns. When not writing, Anna Rose reads tarot, and has previously deejayed radio shows on German and Eastern European rock, metal, and industrial music. She lives with her two guinea pigs, Gingerbread and Razzle-Dazzle.