Behind the tinted windows of a slender stretched limousine, he skulks; his scornful stare shielded behind dark horn-rimmed sunglasses and a shiny crucifix dangling loosely around his twitching, nervous neck. He mumbles beneath his breath a litany of snide, snarling utterances, like a sickly child king ascended to a throne as ill-fitting to him as an infant’s high-chair is to a sullen, grizzly butcher. Clad in a matt black suit, chain smoking tar filled cigarettes and desperately clutching an empty bottle of hard liquor, he shudders beneath the weight of the horror undulating within his brain. What foul demon conjured such careless malevolence from his soul? What sinister spectre consumed his innocent child’s mind in misery, contorting his identity into a twisted iron trap with rusty razor blades for teeth? What devilish ogre crushed his divine spirit into a heap of smouldering coal, tossed into the crucible of a loveless existence, and watched with sadistic pleasure as the flowers in his heart withered? What cement spike skewered his eyes with the pain of a nightmare reality?
The skin of his hands is like leather, stretched tight around his bones, his long, thin fingers wrapped in silver and gold rings, below the jutting knuckle, his skin as dry as polished marble, his fingernails trimmed and manicured like a model’s, his cuticles perfectly level. He rolls expensive tabaco into smooth cigarettes and chain smokes, casually puffing away as the elegant limousine’s pristine black rubber wheels squelch through icy mud and dirty New York City puddles, weaving and meandering through the late night traffic, his gloomy sighs muffled by the comforting pitter patter of rain upon the roof, above the scraggly tufts of his freshly conditioned ash grey hair. His black tailored loafers tap incessantly like a glitch in a computer programme. His pearl white teeth are squeaky clean, like a polished diamond prism, almost surgical in their appearance. His skinny torso slowly rises and falls, his breathing heavy with the strain of tar filled lungs silently gasping, exasperated by the dull aching of his organs.
Cruising cop cars shadow his trail like a lingering spray of dust from a decrepit sputtering fan. His sullen entourage glimpse their iridescent car lights in the near distance and murmur in mutual recognition. Wherever his footsteps tread across the vast globe there inexplicably follows a stream of civil disobedience and violence; desecration has been in his wake as long as he’s lived, as if fate were clutching his coat tails with the vigour of a junky to his needle, or a preacher to his faith, an artist to his muse, or a lover to his woman, a mother to her infant child, or an aging genius to his intellect. Constructed like a towering monolith in his soul lies the vast demonic sculpture of his ego, littered with savage wisdom and beautiful lies. Could it be the eyes of destiny were permanently fixed upon him, in a ceaseless stare designed to unnerve his disjointed spirit? Riddled with fatal nostalgia his tired mind harkens back to the lost innocence of his fairy-tale childhood, days spent immersed in fantasy and make-believe, wandering ancient woodlands in search of some rural paradise sheltered from the searing lights of reality, accompanied by the pixies of his imagination and the scars of his trauma. Left now with the joyless status of martyr, he inwardly weeps, deep within his dilapidated psyche where no psychiatrist dare venture.
With visionary clarity he once beheld the slender naked body of mother earth, her form at once alien and mystical, mesmerising, and he knew not what axioms, what dictums, what aphorisms, what sacred proverbs he could ingest from her, wanting desperately to devour her, to feast upon all she offered with her tantalisingly outstretched hand, praying she would regurgitate her experience unto him, so that he could step inside her mind and peer out of her wide eyes. Alas, it was but a mirage, the devil shapeshifting to his insidious delight, luring lost souls into the evil chasm, the barbaric crucible of his disciple-hood, to touch their spirit with wickedness and henceforth curse them to a life of unknowing, corrupt, hedonistic, unorthodox debauchery. Who could blame that strange young child for falling ill of Satan’s sinister trap?
Short Story by Stamos Mardou