Tag: 2017

These nights are long and so has been my suffering. I grow old but I grew tired long ago. I was a young man when the curse befell me, and now though grey in age and having gained more wisdom, I have not gained any rest, nor freedom from the chains that bind me. I yearned for solitude. I wanted to see what the world was like when no one was watching. How I imagine the forest must have laughed at my ignorance, my own naivety to think I was safe.

That night haunts me as a ghost, tormenting me awake and dreaming. My hands were raised to the night sky, crying out in anguish, pleading for my life.  How the beauty of the moon taunted me as the sharp teeth and claws tore at my flesh, and my screams drowned in my own blood in my mouth. And then I was gone. No longer of this life. Feeling nothing of my own body or the forest floor I lay upon. And then, such pain. Such stretching of flesh and snapping of bones and teeth, and such screams of prayers of wanting to die, and wanting to end it that caught as howls in my throat.

I wished for solitude and now I am cursed to it. Is the moon forever to be my mistress? Is death the only thing I shall ever reap? Trapped in a cycle which I cannot break. Even the moon sets, so when will I? Even the moon is not always full, so why am I always so full of this sadness? It is said that he who is unfit to live in society must be either a beast or a god. I’ve been one long enough and I have been forsaken by the other. I do not wish to be one anymore, or either at all. I only wish for an end to this curse I am bound to by the moon. Everything I touch turns to ash and the taste of blood in my mouth. I pray for Death, and all the world turns its back.

The surgeon had done this many times before, for many years, and he loved this procedure more than any other.  Paper had been lain beneath to catch the refuge, and the cold metal tools waited in a row, glinting in the harsh light.  He drew the lines across the orange colored flesh with precision and palpable excitement. He held the knife as an artist does a paintbrush and made the first incision, the jagged blade penetrating through the outer layers of flesh and then deep inside to the hollow body. He admired the dark cavernous insides, where no eyes had before seen its hidden beauty. He whistled while he worked, his hands steady, the shapes of his carving taking life. The viscera lay around him in piles, and his hands were sticky with the wet bowels of his work. Upon completion, he stood back from the corpse and smiled. And the face of the jack-o-lantern, its jagged-toothed mouth, grinned back at him.