by Hades
“Like “el condenado” yous are. I wish it good to you but look where yous arr. Even in dead, still currs follows yous! Even dead now stills omen follows. You no hide, look! dis pom was on my hause! I take it for yous... I do not read, becas it say yur condenado... It is only good dat it go in yur grave wit yous. It may rests wit yous forever, and takes dis curs away from my homes and our land, but you mijito is gone.”
She could not stand it and she cried like any mother would. The last thing she did was drop the poem into the hole before she left, and it landed on the higher end of the casket, face down, where my head was lying underneath. Fate must have meant for me to read it, for the casket opened up and I could see the words in Guarani, even through the fibrous wood as though it were made of glass. I read it, and there it stood as the final pronouncement: a vindication for those things I’d done.
ON ENTITY’S EDGE
Spring, in a mountainous flow, has overcome the valley.
The raven, the crow, they sprawl together
As the motions of time entwine in the gutter
The Entity came to me and said dark days were upon me.
That night would no tomorrow bring.
He was a hooded man with the finger of death.
He touched a lonely flower and I watched it wither away.
Now all is black, at night.
It seems like it’s night, but it’s just dark.
There’s no illumination surrounding a single being.
I’m just alone, on the edge,
Standing at the end of existence.
The circle of dawn has come with a halo and aurora of light.
Its beams no longer bounce off my eternity’s matter.
I just remain as a black bird circles far beyond, up ahead
On entity’s edge.
There was no further vision after that. My mind closed as sight, sound, and everything but the weight of my body, fled. It was dark again, but I was still in the casket. My arms and legs felt numb: a strange sensation that felt out of place for one that is dead. It was un-resting, not like it was supposed to be. Death had meant rest, but this death was the un-rest. My joints felt tired, more tired than they had ever felt, as though I had lived my life and never gone to sleep. I was impressed with this great fatigue, as though the shadow of it stretched to infinity. I tried to tell myself that I could still look forward to a new stage and that this would all be over soon, yet the foreboding was intolerable, and I could not look or believe that it was real forever.
And that insufferable foreshadow is all I’ve had ever since. That terrible stage of decay and fatigue never left. My life’s story has come to an end, and so I tell it to myself once more to remember that I once was a man. I am in the grave and from here I recall what life I led. But I have given up hope. Perhaps I will come forth from this site to rise with all the other dead someday, but I do not place my trust in that.
I don’t know when it was that I gave in to my fears of a never-ending grave, but when I did my last sacred hope was peeled from my rotting skin. Thinking back on it, the only other event that drilled into me as hard was the closing of the casket lid. At first I don’t think I realized what was happening, so I must have blocked it out, but since then the images have all come back, piece by piece, to form the frightening scene of it.
There I lay as the lid closed on me. The loud sound, as the lid slammed shut, forever reverberates in my mind. It was the first token of my absolute death, everything else after it was only further testimony to the fact, but that singular event totally closed the door to any other explanation about what was happening to me. I do not think I have ever been so afraid in all my life. The whole undergoing was intensely horrid. When the lid came crashing shut, it felt as though I tried to hold my breath, then after a few moments I felt the horror of asphyxiation as the air slowly drained from my lungs. I struggled to inhale but could not for I was dead and it went on this way for many awful minutes until I gave it up and realized I had stopped breathing for a long time.
The wood against my back was not so terrible, though it had splintered through the skin. I began accepting things the way they were and realized pain was only imagined, for I had no body with which to feel. So I lay there for some time and then began to wonder where I’d be going, while the dark crept in around me.
There was nothing to see for a long time. I hoped for a better place; to be taken to some alternate. This hope lingered for a little while, until it too became corrupt through the increasing fear of darkness. Thoughts of the judgment day, hell and heaven raced through my mind, and everything I’d been taught in life welled up to swallow me whole.
I can also remember the moment of death. The breath, which was giving life to my cells, escaped like a balloon of helium. I felt the breath of the creator leaving through my nostrils with my last exhale. After that, and because of that new memory, how I’ve longed for breath. That longing is yet another chain, without my body; its emptiness becomes me: a void where once every pore swam in oxygen and now everything is choked.
But as time has passed, and as my body has wasted into the earth that formed its life, I find it is better now – without my body. No, not a comfort, but a little better. Before, I only knew the pain while I almost felt my blood cells as they began to decompose.
So now I lay here, waiting for time to do nothing. Death was long ago. My body is now long decayed. Darkness still rules – not like the deep darkness – but as darkness can be when covered by a ton of dirt. The pain of my natural eyes has finally fled me. Before, while they were still flesh, I could feel a longing for the light. I’d squint without squinting, trying to focus as best one can when all muscle is dead. Now, all has eroded back to Mother Earth. The pain of unnatural blindness has naturally left. It is a relief. My body has gone to soil because it was heavy and spoiled. I am not relieved that it has thus rotted, nor do I view its demise as a lifting of the spirit. It is only that now my yearning has become more tolerable, without the last of my flesh to taunt me.
Here I have laid, without expectancy, in this grave of quarantine, my spirit rendered immobile as in coma, without explanation. How long I have been strapped in this condition is unknown. Time was easier to reckon while my body still wrapped me. Like clothes, I could watch it wear away: flesh becoming earth while the insects ate, and I could somehow calculate how long it took to decompose. The casket took a little longer, three or four times longer than my body, but even that turned to soil. Then the earth settled into the hollow it had made. Yet there I lay with nowhere to progress to. Deep in the dirt, a horizontal image of a ghost trapped where it ought not to be trapped. Time passed and now there is no telling time.
Something has prevented me from moving from this place. But I am powerless. Only my mind can act; but the joints of thought are rusting. Nothing is left alive. Even my spirit, I believe, is dead. I am at an end. I feel it now. I am standing on the edge of existence, as the poem so dreadfully put it, to watch myself become extinct as the last of my ions dissipate back into the universe. Not to become nothing, because matter can never cease to be (the same way that matter can never be formed out of the nothing), but my identity is becoming lost.
But my uncertainty of future things remains. I do not know for sure what end will come. Only one man knew, and he must be dead a long time now. It was his note that explained my torture. It must have been he that put me to this end. Had I not let him speak to me, or had I not replied, then death might not have turned for me. But somehow he was able to change the right way of things; preventing my soul from being set free.
I long for something to take place; maybe to let me go from here. I cannot stand the time - endless as it is. My mind drifts wondering through the obscurity of doubt, but how can I think that something will happen when nothing has for so long? No one answers me. I am in the same grave where they buried me, yet I could be here for eternity. Can anything else be expected as the time passes? Can anything be done?
I have said I
will never cease to be, but what does that mean to me if my thoughts continue to deteriorate at an ever-increasing rate? Death didn’t bring to me rest. It just took me beyond, where there’s no end to the torment. Though I cease, yet this cursed legacy will live on. To take from me even that which I have loved, the last of every memory, is the final torment to my overthrow. And as I have spoken: even the shame was my company, for it brought me her. I longed for liberation, but now that it ends, I will face nothingness for the last time. As it was with the closing of my casket, while my eyes still watched, the shame was just a small hint – pointing towards more formidable things to come.
About The Author
Born from The Pit Hades has traveled to the ends of the world, and drunken in all cultures. From the height of Berlin to the dawning of mankind, one of his greatest boastings is his many titles.
After the dark ages Hades quickly realized that education was his primary focus. His first goal was to travel to the four corners of the world and spread his mission to the churches. Shortly thereafter, he gained his credibility by embracing science as the new religion.
Since then, Hades has continued to travel, focusing on the younger generation, targeting the cause of what is now being perceived as this country’s collapse. From traditional methods to alternative techniques fostering a women’s choice, Hade’s full endorsements across the media have facilitated his invention, ingenuity, and success. He has become revered through the intricacies of plunder, mayhem, and the secret combinations of men and women everywhere. Most of his loyal followers stand accountable to no one.
His previous works include: The Great Tower, The Fall of Man, Girl in the Train, Inferno, The Pit, Off Grid.
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