All the Roads I Ran.

By Kayal S

Not luck. Just leverage. A lavish request. 

Poetic, painful, pleasure. 

A storm lashes out on a cliffside. Lightning edging its way closer, scattering lustre and foreboding belly-blown bellows of thunder refracted by the rippling surface of the salty sea, flooding the plains in the middle of who knows where. 

The macabre throbs of electricity trembled the glass, droplets of water racing each other to meet the pastel of the rickety, rusted door of this shelving unit of a car. Vintage is a euphemism to sell off to the vulnerable. Or so they think. 

Thought. 

Past tense. 

Not anymore. 

And never again. 

She was named by many.

Known by none. 

Hidden away in the depths and the damp. 

Skin so pale, it was never meant to see the light. 

And yet now bathed in the iridescence of twilight. You’d find hard convincing it was meant for any better. 

The poised power that she somehow was able to grasp at that she wielded, degraded to…

Woman. Far lost. 

Volunteer. Far privileged. 

Asset. Far purposed. 

Victim. Far… 

Actually Goldilocks, sometimes you gotta live with what you got. 

The most well-known; as well as you could be known, when your tear-stricken self had once been forced out of the crevices of the unknown. 

Eclipse 11.7.

The Watchers called me that. 

Worming their way in through the bars.

Watching. Waiting. 

With their eyes with too much white, the only sign to symbolize the crack of dawn. 

Occasionally doused with that unforgiving red. Those fractions in the hours when mercy seemed to pain them. 

That scarlett…Or was it crimson? Whatever that blends in to mask the spills of your blood. 

I can’t recall… And that pains me. 

More than any pain that that mismatched ticking of those discordant gears bolstered asymmetrically into their perfectly imperfect contraption tossed to the misfits, could make in a lifetime. 

A lifetime silenced, washed away with the first whiff of anarchy. 

Vengeance snuffed out, like the wick of the candles lining the archaic passageways of the dungeons starking contrast to the hyper contemporized, spick and span hallways, a labrynth imploding in on itself, caving under the pressure of the whispered voices snaking beneath the cement, pleas for help, a cease to the pouring hellfire, emblazoning flesh and skin with unspeakable stories lingering.

 Unspeakable, because they were deemed unworthy of speaking about. 

A hollow shell to run through flickering images of a crackling film. 

In and out. A steady pulse. 

Each day, a different rhythm. Every flicker, at the flip of a switch. 

Our lives. In their hands. 

Plural. Where you see one person. Stare in the mirror, and see me morph. 

Because that’s how they claimed my serrated edges fit the jigsaw puzzle. 

I’m a rarity of a riddle. Living and breathing.

Now. Now after my forever is finished. 

Now, when the perished corpse that I staggered around as, sizzles with significance. 

Now, when I’m ready to unravel the paradox, I’m an enigma woven into.

Death takes away life. Doesn’t stop you from living. 

Being nothing…It gives you a choice. 

Choose to be everything. 

She whirled along the borders, driving rashly, the wheel spinning uncontrollably, like she had never driven before, but the faint familiarity of her fingertips dancing across the leather of the steering wheel, tingling beneath her skin, kept her from ever swerving, let alone crashing with her expertly maneuvering, nonchalant with her ferocious touches, and savage strokes about it’s circumference. 

The unmistakable jangle of the cuffs screwed into her bones, nearly faded to a whine at the back of her head. Concentrating just enough, she could almost muffle it to mute. 

To an outsider, futile attempts.

 To a caged circus animal, kicking off the running start to its rampage, knowing only one sound. By reverberation, echo, and resonance. Recognition wired uncanny into the matter of said “one’s” brain. It’s...

Racing time. Rushing adrenaline. And a receding tide.

One faded golden gate. 

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The artificially pigmented paint caught the light from an unnatural dimension, fragmented angles, peeling off in chunks, falling to the ground alongside forbidden mist, drifting in bellows to float the summits of the woods that erupted like shards of wrought iron, enclosing the clearing in. Inching closer by minutes. Jaws threatening to clamp shut, the abyss. A vast expanse of spidery webs spindling to scratch the first light, cracking the sinking storm clouds. 

A chalk-white smoke to quench the thirst of confession. 

Chalk.

Chalk like their blind-sided eyes. Chalk like the walls I mangle to spit out the cacophony killing me from inside. Chalk like the silky straight lines slinking their way to calibrate time into a colour-coded entity.

A pearlescent past. 

Present the colour of gun-powder. 

And a blacked out future. 

Redacted to shield its element of surprise. 

I saw that time stretch into willowy filaments, stringing themselves together with the forged flimsy of burnished brambles tattooing themselves against that flawlessly painted cerulean sky, dimming with darkness and radiating with the tropical shades of daybreak, dazzling with the twinkling trinkets folded into its solace. A warm blanket of swirling chaos out of harmony. A dissonant album of stolen hours.  

The car reeled to a stop. The door screeching against its hinge, as it swung open, letting the breeze brush past with the sickeningly sweet scent of woodland wildflowers, blossoming, nearly knocking me sideways as I hobbled towards the picket fence. 

Not the quintessential white picket and red brick she would set the expectations for as a welcome. 

More like sharp teeth, jagged and jarring, beckoning the beholder with a ruin, that promises a foregone damnation, a compulsion to collapse into. 

The bridge to cross the threshold to the household of the mistress of evil. 

Who knows what awaits her inside. 

Perhaps the pretty lady skulking through the underworld disguised into the thicket, bloodshot irises unflinching, unyielding… Never blinking. Still as the shadows that stalk the shaded path. And staring with a fuming intensity, that would give the flame-tongued devil himself a run for his money. 

A piercing glare, with the harshness of the wildest and worst of Siberian windstorms, an analogy that just sits right to say, a feeling, a fatal impulse, drawing comparisons with dessicated eminences that I had yet to set eyes on. 

A destiny or a demise. Or the happy medium, met with something in between. 

Mother’s aura seems to slip right off the page, doesn’t it?

Stays just as deadly. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Of course, I wouldn’t know that. 

I never knew her. 

If not for the abandon of the hastily scrawled fountain pen ink, bleeding through the back of the black and white, blotting photograph.

Yellowing parchment. 

The final resting place for a woman who looked like her personality was a status symbol to state her too well-off to not hold a heartfelt disdain for the colour. How ironic. 

She scorned yellow, and now it’s practically her signature.

Suppose her sense of humour survives even death. 

Lethal presence only sharpened by the parasitic ink strokes carving out her cosmetically decayed face. If you could even call its shredded skeleton, a “face” anymore. 

Whoever I am. Whoever I was back then. 

Guess I learned from the best. 

Even half-dead I had the good sense to tell what was worth spending precious wits on. 

Pity. 

Please…

Who’s to say that one day it won’t be me?

I held out a shuddering hand, wheeling ajar its bite. 

Met with the full force of nostalgic delight.

And an obliviousness that I had gotten used to clouding my mind.

She must have gotten it from my dad.

An irrationality spiking ultimately shallow decisions like one to risk my life for the literary enlightening of random coordinates etched by darkening the dates in my most treasured novel, to challenge my captor’s cortexes and corneas as I fled in a chase, meandering for meaning of a life I never knew, with distorted shapes and disembodied faces as my guiding light. 

Reliving every repeat. Hitting every excruciating refresh. Shattering every biography written for me, by me. 

A parallel self of me, I barely remember.

A flash of her lifetimes, woven intricately into mine. Echoing together. As one sound. One layered message. 

Tilting the balance. 

Every step of the way an inch closer. 

An inch that they forget matters to the big picture. 

A shift in the balance.

Leaving behind nothing. 

I have no regrets. 

She has less. 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

I pulled the curtain aside.

Parting at my touch. Pulling with repulsion. Pained with the vow of patience. 

The dainty see-through cloth fell apart in my hands, embossed with something sticky, clinging to the grooves of my skin…Invisible but in attendance…Hi- 

Candied apples. 

White and red striping everything in sight. 

Not rich like the depth of blood. 

Soft and superficial. Sugary. Like currents of dripping caramel. 

Mixed into a blend of buttered aroma, wafting about hinting at the presence of popcorn at the round of a bend. 

The orchestra of a live band resonated somewhere in the far distance, revolving the arched turrets of the discoidal, round performance ring, the battalion of oscillations brushing up the rust coloured sand up, to tickle my branded ankles. 

Bored in with my “name”, the swollen, geometric bumps that inflamed my skin, in angry red patches, swam in symphony with the emerging stacks of stands, climbing skyward, formulated with the patterned sublimity of a grand panorama. 

A still life screwed into substantiality. 

Layered behind, intricately arranged soundtracks; erupts mellow voices in a cheer of gallant laughter, my mind constructing the ridiculous smile that hides it.

A horrifyingly colourful spectrum of horrendously sewn outfits, doused in glitter as if that might make it better, littered my imagination.

 Faces painted in scattered splotches of paint and cakey makeup, belonging to acrobats, clowns, jugglers, trapeze artists, tightrope walkers, and impossibly more, bounding through the chaos.

Navigating through meticulously themed sets, tossing around flesh-eating flame, swivelling aerial silks like brush strokes in a classic masterpiece, riveting displays of contortionism pressing the limits of the human body.

Every inch, and corner, summoning the occult divination, with a sleight of a hand. 

Illusion cascading down the exotic animals, never before revealed to the world, revelling in their spotlight. 

A magic like never before. 

And there the barracks broke. 

Even the universe knows I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Curating a collection that blurs the lines between wonder and the worlds. 

Composing a melody that flaunts effortless beauty. 

Crafting a story that mirrors the storm inside me. 

Mother knows best. 

The facade crumbles away around me. Taking a piece of me with it, in its descent, a last hurrah as it clutches, my soul, my sense, and my last shred of sanity. 

Twisting the joyful spectacle, unsettling the bases of marvel, and creativity that it leans on. Picturing a nightmare alive, with the finesse of a fairytale. 

Lights flickering. Eerie shadows clawing out of their graves. Tearing away at waning fabric. 

Masks suspended and floating in place with crackling coats, gilded with hollow sinister grins, staring too long, looking too deep, like they could suck the secrets stuck inside you with a swipe of their sight. 

The music teases. 

Morphing in and out in an off-key beat, warped and churning, with unnerving might. 

Marionettes that cling to life, mirrors that mess up your reflection, tightrope walkers disappearing mid-act, zipping open the fabric of space and time. 

Cages unbuckled unnatural noises escaping from inside, slamming with vigour as the wind snuck in through gaping rips, the rust chipping it apart, carousel horse screeching against scraping hinges, that just seemingly didn’t want to let go. 

The oh-so familiar fragrance of aging sawdust, fusing with something sour, something on the tip of my tongue that I just couldn’t place spiking with revulsion, and whispers that materialized like giggles galore. Comforting. 

When you assume that sound slips past the lips of a human.

The struggling electrics cut out. Plunging into a maelstrom of blackness. 

A bunch of blemishes strayed into sight. Bright. Neon. Blinding

Speckles, civilized to smears, extended to streaks, staining the borderless caves, plummeting and surging at the same time, in sync, tarnishing the pure inky calamity around me. Tranquil portrayed as a cataclysm. Catchy. 

My broken brain was a vortex of stimulation, nearing my breaking point. Unable to make sense of anything, a psychic compulsion that employed a searing, pierce of physicality. 

This was real. Very much so. Unfortunately. 

On my knees, covering my ears, blocking the world out of what wasn’t really a world.

When the blotches took shape, another traverse through insignias; symbol to character to full on letters. 

Framing a lethal phrase, meant as the last siren call to wail, meant as an alert, an emblem translating to a menace of a warning. A prophecy of finality, and fatality.

She never falters.

“Riddles are only fun, when one doesn’t know the answer”

Cursive. Highlighter fluid. Perfect punctuation.

A teacher. 

She was a teacher. 

I was a teacher. 

The worst disguise a monster could choose to dress in. 

Most trusted, most thriving. 

Betrayal in its coarsest form. 

Could be a professor. Thrived in its deceit. 

It felt like implosion from within, and annihilation from without.

Pressure both ways. 

Her ink bleeding from my hands. 

Her blood rushing in my veins. 

Not mother’s.

For once. For twice. It was truly mine. 

Mine manipulated to match what they wanted.

The lush of a carnival contingency weaving away an alternative pathway adrift the dark thread. 

Into another maze. 

Freedom is an illusion.  

As the world augmented in a super-impositioned pandemonium, glitching, in neon strands of pink, teal, green disarray, mayhem in the rawest havoc. 

I build my whole life, around the life I decrepit for. 

Codes threading a network, illustrating an illumination of strings dilapidating the crackles. 

A novel with a circular plot, starting and ending with electricity. 

What if I never had a real life to live?

A cyberpunk city, a sunset scenery, an extravagant penthouse of an apartment, black and white comedy, swapping between thematically envisioned and put together scenes of a graphical world. 

Virtuality. 

The only thing I really had to call mine. 

All the roads I ran. And this is the only dead-end I have deserved.

I earned. Slash the blood, sweat, and tears.

Yet to fall. Soon to arrive. 

Just dead. And then some. Revived to live it all again. 

New look, new body, new mind. 

Same soul. Here to stay. 

Like the majestic phoenix.

Ascend, become, return. 

Revenge. 

Well…

Riddle me this. 

Crash and burn. 

Rise again. 

Reborn. 

As another her. 

By Kayal S