Rigidity of Devotion
Vows of a Liquid Grave
Paid subscribers can find the narration here.
My face is a canvas of cobwebbed cracks; my left eye a glass globe meant to probe at the void. Next to me, Clarice hangs by thin, fraying fibers—her silk knit stiff with grime and grit. We are the passengers of a speckled swan that hasn’t moved in forty years. Yet I feel us hurling and whirling into the darkness.
We hang over a liquid grave that tastes of iron and roses. Just ahead, the path is choked by a bloated, bogged sow. We call him Albert. He’s a mound of bruised meat, smudged in the sludge of the unused canal.
A cracked vanity mirror is strapped to his flank with a rank and rusted wire. Catching the only light we have. The neon heart above the tunnel’s mouth. The gods’ own light.
Clarice’s head lolls at an angle. Her porcelain jaw jammed, fused with grime. I hear her clattering thoughts rattle and prattle in her skull, like dried peas. I watch the wind rock her eyes in their sockets. She shouts, in puppet:
“Is this the forever, Arthur? Are we the pale, passing shape of a name the swan dreams?”
With every snap of thread, Clarice drops a little closer to the blackened water. With every snap, I feel the vastness of the void working at my weakening wires.
We are waiting.
For some day—some hour—in the future, entropy will finish its meal. I want to reach for her clutched and shrouded hand, to feel the comfort of a woman’s touch, a shared end. But my joints are rusted into a permanent reach toward nothing. I reply, in puppet:
“Yes, Clarice, the swan is dreaming. And day is about to break.”
Thanks for reading. This story was based on a prompt by Labyrinthia Mythweaver found here. It read:
I want flash fiction. I want gothic romance. I want existential dread. I want something totally unhinged.
Drop a prompt in the comments and see your story come to life.
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Jeeze that's awesome!
The build was not slow. It echoed and ached.