by Max Jager
"I'd like to buy some cigarettes." Ajax said. The man said nothing, only kept carving.
"Hello?" Ajax waved his hand in front of the Old Man's face. "Could I get some cigarettes."
The Old Man reached underneath and slammed them above a bed of wood shavings.
"How much is that?" Ajax stood with his hands in his pockets, a bit far off from the counter and the knife blade.
"Don't matter. I'll be closing soon anyway."
"Is that so? Doesn't look like you're closing, the shelves are still full."
"Don't matter. Nothing does. It's not my business to see to the closing or the selling anymore. I'm just here to be here."
Ajax looked around. A box cart full of what should have been ice stood next to the glass screens of the refrigerators at the end of the store. The ice had melted. There were only bags now, dripping bags that had pooled water on the far west end of the store.
"Do you remember me? I was the missionary." Ajax said.
"Oh." The Old Man did not even look up. It didn't seem like he even moved his lips, he was only kind of there, in space but not in time.
"I had a frie—" Ajax gulped spit. "I had a business partner with me, at the time."
"Oh." The Old Man sat down his finished totem. It was a crow, or at least looked like one with how deeply black the wood was. On this crow was a beak, which pointed down and gave it the appearance of pecking at its own wooden pedestal. It had a wing, only one, the other was clipped and malformed and resembled more of a nub than a limb. There were no eyes, no details, only the rough figure of the specimen. He set it at the end of the line, seemingly finishing the abominations.
"Weren't you making horses last time?" Ajax asked. The Old Man pushed the cigarettes forward, a polite way of telling Ajax to fuck off. So to speak. Ajax took them, chewed on his tongue and stopped himself from saying anything. He looked to his rear, to a small corner of the building where the back room sprawled, where the door had been left slightly open. Or rather, stuck open. There was a metal shelf stuck in the way of the door, and Ajax stretched his neck to get a better. There were boxes, still, on the floor and food, still, spilling over. And it hit Ajax, like an invisible slap that seemed to knock his brain and eyes out of their holding cells. There was a little girl here once, how could I forget her face.
Her white face, her blond hair and he thought, briefly, the kind of thought that summons the visceral emotion faster than the abstract, such that in his gut he could already feel the sickening coil of disgust much before he could remember the bleeding body on the top of that burning building. He did remember that girl, though did not want to.
His brain, his eyes, returned, rubber banded back by his nerves and veins. He felt sick.
He jogged, then paced, then walked. He could feel his eyes turn unintentionally scarlet and he could feel his lungs pressing for air and he closed his mouth to stop that urgent feeling. The feeling of a throbbing head and heart, the feeling of suffocation. He turned away from the Old Man and stood tall and calm to at least appear cordial. He almost reached the door and was one his eighth step, it felt like a plank walk on the end of a ship. Then the Old Man rose. Ajax could hear the leather chair stretch and scratch.
"You're a missionary, aren't ya?" The Old Man said, he pulled his head back and almost laughed in a burlesque tone. "Did you ever end up duping anyone into believing that garbage?"
"No." Ajax felt stiff as if trapped by a barb wire entanglement. Moving hurt, breathing hurt, living hurt.
"I thought as much." The Old Man looked down again. He leaned over and from the floor picked up another block of wood, red oak. "Hope is a tough thing to sell."
The words sank into Ajax, like an ancient monument inside of him had finally corroded at its stand and fell, it collapsed on him and he could feel the dirt and dust pushing him away. His shoulder hunched over. He moved his hands to a shelf and left the free cigarettes next to a golden bag of potato chips. He left. The doorbell rung. He did not look to anyone as he made it to his car. He sat down, took a breath and fixed his rear side windows, there was a reflection of a stranger in the glass. He couldn't make out the face, it was foreign to him. He could only tell that the face looked a bit sad, a bit teary eyed, and very pale. He closed his eyes, tried to remember what he looked like, a few words came to mind. Tall, brown, unyielding. He didn't see any of that. Only the figure of the blond-haired, pale-faced girl.
He needed to drive. Away, anywhere. But where? Anywhere! But. Where?
And he decided under some uncertain terms that he would just go to the lake, not to do anything in particular, but just to fill his lungs with fresh air. Not to meet or see or do anything, but just to live there on the edge of the body of water. Even if just for a moment.
A moment, that's it. He'd just go there for a moment.
8:14 PM
The Day the Sun Fell on Ajax
Anno Domini Mors August 10th, 2017
8:14 PM
The car was parked some distance away from the lake, it was underneath the shade of a tree though Ajax did not know why he even bothered. It wouldn't be long, he thought he knew. He had walked deep into the forest, past brown and white police vehicles and the yellow tape that squared off the fishing store. He went further, deeper, following the edge of the lake. He thought he was here for the cup, only the cup.
He went along the ridges of the mountains where the small pebbles cascaded down like the medieval boulder traps of castles old. The fish in the lake spun in circles and fretted away at the touch of his feet. He covered himself in mud, in water. He sunk himself knee-deep into the lake and came out finally at that tapered end where the frogs croaked to each other and where the fireflies were beginning to collect like small stars. And he came to the tree, with the X. Then further away, to the spot (a spot he had no difficulty in actually finding, because the mound was so big and obvious that anyone could have found it) and he cupped his hands to scoop dirt and inside found the cup in its shallow grave. It was as if there wasn't even an effort made to hide it, or perhaps not enough time.
And he put it in his hands, rubbed the mud into the gems and shook the gold stem some. There was a drink left, he figured.
He walked away initially and felt the cool air brush against him and push his hair. He must have made it halfway before he felt short of breath, before his legs started to shake and weaken. And he knelt on one leg over the shore.
"He's probably already dead," Ajax said. "Or at least in the act of dying."
He kicked rocks. They split water and forced the fish to swim.
"He doesn't have a plan to get out, does he?" That wasn't the question he wanted to ask, he rubbed his chin. "Why did he go in the first place? They're just strangers. Nobodies. Fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a million. The world turns, doesn't fucking matter."
He looked up to the glaring sun that fell into crimson, the red flushed the water face.
"Nobodies who have families and children, who live and who love." He slapped his leg. "But so what? What is a man owed? A couple seconds out of the womb, a moment to breath and that's it. What's a man owed? To live long enough, just barely long enough that you start to miss it when the ride is over? Who fucking cares. The world turns, the solar system spins, the universe expands. Everything goes dead, dying, or missing. Doesn't matter. Fuck it." He walked. His head was low and he steered clear from the view of the red glare on the water, the giant circle. His footsteps popped with the sound of stones shooting out from underneath his feet. A lily pad sunk.
"That's just the way it is. You're not owed life!" He scratched his face. "But who has a right to take it, too? No one does. And yet it was taken. By the dozens. Over and over and over again. Fuck man, fuck!"
His heart beat fast.
"They didn't live a good life or even a pleasant life. But it was still theirs, to resign or to suffer through. They never got to make that choice..."
He looked at the cup, swished the liquid around.
"What do I
want?" He stared at that black substance as if a crystal ball. There was no answer, just darkness and the reflection of Ajax within that darkness.
"I guess I'd like to tell that retard Darr a thing or two, wouldn't I? Call him for what he is, stupid. And if I could, I'd like to round up as many likeminded people too." He laughed, flat and lifeless. "So we can all take turns calling him a retard." His lips trembled. "Yeah, I'd like that. That'd be fair in this very unfair world. Wouldn't it?"
Wouldn't it? The words rang into him. His shoulders eased, his heart eased, his eyes eased. All of him seemed to hunch over the small goblet and all of him seemed to fall into it.
"I'd like to help." His heart popped, a kind of balloon. And the stones within his heart, falling, falling down the cliff, down into the water.
And he drank. With his nose pinched, he took a gulp. It had the texture of cough medicine, a slow molasses or mucus that trickled down his throat. It tasted sweet though, a bit like metal too, like he had just been fed candied nails.
Then he vomited. Hard, for minutes. Vomited until there was nothing but stomach acid left, and then some more, until the floor was septic and beginning to smell of toxic waste.
Ajax sat near the lake. He vomited in fits between absolute stillness and angry convulsions. Somewhere in between, he fitted the cup back into his coat. It went like that, him kneeling over the water, his head finally submerged, the fish and the amphibians scrambling away, the birds of prey benched atop the drooping branches with the meek wind that to brushed their feathers.
Then those too, flew away. Far above. For whatever came out of Ajax came in waves and had only begun, that strange, almost bright purple substance. The color of unoxidized blood, and like unoxidized blood, turning red almost immediately upon contact with the outside. But it got worse. It spun in circles, a whirlpool. Ajax's whole body fell into the water now, dragged by that current, into the deep cloud. He could not see between fuzzy, glossy eyes and the red (now turning black) substance. He only felt it, like tingles, like small fingers scratched all around his body.
Whatever it was, that ink-like substance, he drowned in it.
And when the murk and cloudy darkness cleared. Nothing remained. The fish came back, slowly at first, until the whole school had filled the vacuum. There they danced, danced and swam to the disappearance of Ajax.
And Ajax? Somewhere. He awoke somewhere and only noticed he was alive by the figure of a red ring in front of him, an oddity, that seemed to only retreat further away the closer he himself got and he (Ajax) floating in what he thought or felt was oblivion, though he was wrong, wrong so very wrong, because from those dark corners there seemed to be a materialization. Hands, many hands, and arms that gripped and clawed, that made him gasp and in doing so, releasing that precious air from his body. They grabbed hold of him, outstretched him.
He tried screaming. Nothing, there was no air to break and to vibrate. So he was mute. Bizarre, this infinite nothingness, that dragged and pulled until the very limbs of his body split and de-attached from him.
He would have cried was he not paralyzed with that toxin of fear. He saw his limbs cover the threshold, the little brown bits of him carried with delicate hands that receded and eventually disappeared. They fell into the ring and he did not know what to think; why he was not bleeding, why was he not dead?
Neither dying nor dead simply hurt. His face scrunched into silent agony. It was in between a face of defeat and shock like a tortured man hearing the footsteps of the executioner down the dungeon halls.
His legs were gone, arms too, most of his torso and his hips, disappeared. All that remained was a chest, a neck, a head. A torso that kept spinning in circles, eyes that looked outward to the myriad colors of yellow and red. He was being spied upon. He felt them creep up from that nothingness, those voyeurs. And slowly, they showed their primeval forms, whatever they were, chimera or demon.
A woman (more thing than woman), nude, full-bodied, scaly almost with the elongated neck and fangs across the wide mouth, looked down at him. Another, two men this time, welded together on their singular back who crawled on all fours and who turned themselves like a fallen tortoise. Siamese turtles, it almost made him laugh, he tried to but his eyes wouldn't stop crying.
And then the others came, the long dead and long forgotten, the pained, the pitiful. Those that carried men like dogs with the chains around their necks. Those that begged for mercy, creatures or otherwise. Most of them had no mouths or arms or will to beg, all of them watched Ajax fall.
His body turned like a satellite. He could not say he was facing up, there was no up, he only knew he was flipped and faced something. That amalgamation of disgust. That prime object of revulsion, a monster bloated and whose folds of flesh seeped out like waves of the sea. This creature who looked down Ajax from his broken seat of corpses. A sort of throne, and him, the king of filth upon it, floating too with Ajax. It was pierced, stabbed all across. There were smaller creatures, holding these chains, who stretched his flesh back so a face could reveal itself. This, the only creature that could seemingly stand and form a plane in the nothingness, this, that creature of yellow and green flesh. It revealed its small head, it revealed its gold teeth and its uneven eyes that looked carefully at Ajax.
"Toy."
Was that what it said? He thought. His face went cold. The arm came closer, dripping skin upon him like a shawl of rotten flesh and past the arm, Ajax saw it. That infantile greed that brimmed in the creature's eyes.
Fortunately, it was too late. The last hand came to grab Ajax, came to send him down through the red ring and he did not know what to feel, only knew the storm of emotions that capsized his courage. Shock. Disgust. Curiosity? He stopped thinking. He couldn't bear to think. He closed his eyes and fell asleep and whispered to himself with silent words: What a strange thing, to have your soul amputated from your body.
Ajax
Ajax
Ajax awoke with hands around his neck. He gasped and tasted sweet ocean water that burned as it came through his nose and mouth, it had a bitter aftertaste, like wine. Drinking and burning and confused, Ajax struggled with the firm hands still ringing his neck. He turned to the assailant. Phantoms, ghosts? They looked like ghouls, malnourished and deformed, rotting and vile looking, as if the very waters around them had turned these ghouls into mush. His stomach was full and at last, in that brink of death, he made an effort. Ajax gripped the hand. He felt the bony muscular limb and snapped it off him. It shattered. Glass, ancient bone, whatever this ghoul was was fragile and he saw that limb drop down to the bottom floor, to an off-putting darkness, where myriad glares had begun to appear. Corpses, the dead, bitter faced and angry. He thought immediately, knew immediately where he was: the long river Styx, where the dead do not sleep, where they kill and murder 'till end-times. The restless river Styx.
He swam. As fast as he could, he did not check his body, did not even inspect the claw marks and grazes that found themselves around him. He burst into that frantic, almost flailing swim. They came after him, five, six, he couldn't tell, only heard the muffled wail and only noticed the bubbles of their screams as they rose up from below and fizzled him.
He broke the water, at last. Nearly jumped out of it too and clung to the nearest stone, both hands clawing for the strange black rocks around him. He felt another grab. He felt the chill of wet skin on fresh air, and felt it too of death's grab upon his feet. He could hear them now without that ocean filter. He could hear the high pitch, crazed, almost choking sound of the violent dead. He looked back. They were nude, deteriorating, drunk with violence.
"Get the fuck off me." Ajax brought his free leg up and then down on the persistent hand around his ankle. It broke into bone, then into dust and steam finally. Ajax crawled to high ground, though his body was low and properly balanced. He was watching the smoke, watching the ghouls and fiends desperate to latch on to him.
He saw how they scratched the stone and how they struggled to rise up the causewa
y. After a while Ajax pitied them. An even longer while after that, he began to be bored of them and instead looked to his surroundings. To the hexagon shaped stones that sprawled the shoreline as if a honeycomb had been split and desecrated on the river bank. Ajax turned, he heard splashing. Inside each section of stone was a small pool of water, orange colored. It felt slimy.
He climbed and made it ten meters high. When he came across flat land, he stopped and fell on his knees. His hands were spread forward and his body dripped with sweat and blood and that sticky water. It must have been heavy too, because Ajax collapsed chest first onto the floor. He put two hands on his face and rubbed the water away, then he turned his body and held his chest and counted his heart until it fell down to gentle rhythm. It was too much. The creatures in that abyss, the monsters in the river. Too much, too heavy. So he laid, his body on its back and upon that line of land where the black geometrical stone broke into gray dirt. It stuck to him and colored his suit white. He sighed, scraped some off and thought that perhaps he was making it worse. So he let go and looked to the sky. No clouds? No color either. It was beige, gray? He couldn't tell. The only object of interest, the only fixture of light seemed to come southward, where a giant red ring rested. It was black and familiar. Perhaps the same ring that had taken him here? It was near the horizon and sat immovable and from the low angle Ajax was watching it, gave the appearance of sucking in the river water. Like a faucet drain of filth.