My arm was a part of myself

I never dreamed transformed

It wasn't til I reached the shelf

And there its loss I mourned

The chemicals were in the vat

Stored within a magician's hat

The chemicals

The chemicals

They crashed on me with a loud splat

My arm was a part of myself

I could not be without

Yet it began to change itself

To something black and stout

The ugly thing that it became

I know not if it has a name

The ugly thing

The ugly thing

Moved and shuddered, not at all lame

My arm was a part of myself

I see I have no choice

What happened there upon the skelf

Grew large but had no voice

The creature then stuck out its tongue

And licked its wounds til it was done

The creature then

The creature then

Departed me to have some fun

#bodyhorror #challenge #poetry #trijanrefrain #transformation

It was 1962, an abandoned and secluded asylum was hidden behind a thick layer of dense forest and vegetation. The once well-maintained driveway was now closing with small trees and bushes. The existence of the complex was only remembered by the eldest inhabitants of the nearest town, and even they never went near.

Remarkably, fresh car tracks could be seen in the mud near the abandoned site, and a car standing in an old storage shed close to the main building. A man stood in front of a window, staring out towards the driveway, as if he were waiting for a visitor. But he wasn’t.

A radio was broadcasting the news, and for the third time, there was no mention of the asylum. Just as Achin had hoped. No one had come up to the old building, and no one seemed to be looking for the 46 year old man that had gone missing three days ago. The radio didn’t even bother mentioning him. It was good.

If they hadn’t found Achin or the missing man yet, it meant they would never find them, at least not until he wanted to be found. There was never much doubt in Achin’s mind: he had planned everything for years. Seventeen long years, he had had nothing else to do than to plan and prepare. He hadn’t had a job, or a wife, or any family or friends. He hadn’t needed any of those since 1945 anyway.

The asylum was very quiet, apart from Achin’s soft footsteps, a few singing birds and the rustling of leaves that could be heard through cracks in the walls and the ceiling. There was one more source of sound though: somewhere in the hallway, Achin heard a few muffled shouts. They came from behind a heavy steel door, behind which the country’s most dangerous lunatics were once locked away. He slipped in the rusty key, and turned it. The door made a hellish noise when Achin opened it with the greatest difficulty.

Inside, a man was tied up in heavy chains that were locked so tight that he couldn’t even move. The bag over his head muffled the shouts that had only increased in number and volume since he had heard the door being pushed open.

Achin had taken him from his morning walk. He had pretended to ask for directions, only to give him a drug that had put him in a deep, hour-long sleep. Then he had dragged the sleeping man into the trunk of his car, and brought him here. Since he had woken up, this was only the third time he had heard the door open. On the first two occasions, Achin had prepared a plate with some bread and water to keep him fed. This third time, the 46-year-old would see more of this asylum, and Achin's scheme.

Achin was proud. Not a soul had seen him since 1946, not that anyone was still alive to remember him, but still. There had been no witnesses the day of the kidnapping, and he had known exactly where his target went for his morning walk every day.

In his ‘study’, as he called it, he had nailed pictures and newspaper articles to a wall. Some were marked with pen or pencil, others connected with each other using a thin wire that could be tied to the nails. All papers on the wall were somehow related to the war. A list of the convicted Nazi leaders from the Nuremberg trials was connected with pictures of concentration camps. In the centre of the wall was the largest picture of them all, most little wires eventually ran towards the nail that held it there.

On the picture was the face of a uniformed soldier, clearly a Nazi officer. He looked young, brutal and fierce. As though he believed he was Death’s personal scythe. Next to this picture, a yellow star with Hebrew letters in the middle was pinned to the wall, seemingly unrelated to the other articles and pictures.

Achin removed the bag from the Nazi officer’s face, revealing his surroundings for the first time. His chains were attached to the old rusty hospital bed on which he was laid down. The room looked like an abandoned surgery room: if someone didn’t know they were standing in an asylum, they could think they were in an old hospital. Back in the day, this place was used for horrifying experiments on the lunatics. Or for equally horrifying treatments.

Achin heard the hum of the diesel generator in the next room, his equipment was now fully powered. He took a white doctor’s gown from a hook, and put it on. Some ancient splatters of blood could still be seen.

“What are you doing? Where are we? What is this?” said the 46-year-old. Achin wasn’t going to say anything. He had thought about what he could say, what he should say. Should he talk about his own years in the concentration camp? From 1941 until 1944 when the Nazi officer, nicknamed “Der Hund”had abused him, tortured him, starved him? Or should he talk about how, when the officer left the camp, he whispered into Achin’s ear how he would find more ways, better ways to destroy him without killing him? Or should he talk about 1945, the year Achin was liberated, only to find his village in ruin, his friends and family raped and murdered? The few villagers that survived could never give a name, only a nickname: Der Hund, or ‘The Dog’ in English.

Achin had decided to say absolutely nothing at all, leave the man in fear. In doubt. It had only been seventeen years, but people like this had killed thousands, why would he remember Achin of all people? Even if he did recognize him, it didn’t matter. Achin was, as far as he knew, officially dead. Just one more missing Jew after the war, no need to look for him.

Apparently, ‘the dog’ also never made many friends. Nobody seemed to come look for him anyway. And today, Achin would get his revenge. He could of course just put the dog into a cell, let the door rust shut completely and forget about him, he could have reported him to the authorities, or just slit his throat in an instant. But all of that was no revenge. It was mercy. 

The dog was barking to be released now, but soon enough he would be begging to be killed. To be put out of his misery, to be put down, like a real dog. But Achin hadn’t planned on showing mercy today, and he had planned for the last seventeen years.

Most of those years, Achin had been constructing a plan, trying to find something he could do to make The Dog suffer, to make him pay. His plan for today was the final idea, the only one that gave him a feeling that he will be doing the worst anyone could ever do to a fellow man. He had no armies or wars at his disposal, so he needed to revert to other methods. The abandoned asylum had given him all the tools he needed for his plan to work.

Achin still hadn’t said a word. The dog hadn’t stopped barking, yelling and shouting, even while Achin attached the IV painfully into his neck. A mixture of adrenaline and procoagulants was dripping into his blood. The adrenaline would keep him conscious the entire time, the procoagulants would quickly stop the bleeding, to save him from dying from anemia. A blood pack was also attached, and Achin could closely regulate when new blood could stream into the Nazi dog.

Achin had tested the surgery on several small animals he had found in the woods, but he knew he could do this. Before the Gestapo took him from his home, he had been a physician for quite a while. He had even served in the Prussian army as a field medic in the first war.

Fifteen minutes after the IV was attached, Achin took his first tool. It was a large, remarkably clean instrument that wasn’t too common in hospitals. It was a pair of huge pruning shears. Using another tool he had found in the asylum, he opened the dog’s mouth and locked the tool so it couldn’t be closed. The officer looked in agony and finally shut up. He gagged in some saliva, while Achin took a pair of pincers and pulled out the officer’s tongue as far as he could. Then, Achin took the pruning shears and placed it as deep in the mouth as he could. One hard squeeze in the tool caused a part of the tongue to let loose, while blood started to fill the dog’s mouth. Another squeeze in the tool made more come loose. The tongue was contracting and shocking heavily. It required Achin a third and final squeeze to make the entire tongue come loose. He took it by his pincers and put it into a glass jar. The officer gagged a bit more on his own blood, but the procoagulants quickly stopped the bleeding.

Achin had been so excited for cutting out the tongue, that he hadn’t heard the officer’s begging and crying for mercy. He only noticed when he felt how his ears hurt when he was done. The dog must have been loud, but now he would at least never give his orders of death and suffering anymore. Achin left the room, giving his patient time to recover, and new blood to enter his bloodstream.

A solid fifteen minutes later, Achin returned. He held one of the largest and most powerful chainsaws he could find. The Dog looked horrified at first, and relieved when he put it on a table, taking back the pruning shears.

The Dog’s screams were muffled due to not having a tongue anymore, but Achin decided to listen to every single bit of sound that passed over the Dog’s lips this time. Achin enjoyed it like the sweetest music that had ever been made, when he cut all ten toes and put them into a little glass jar next to the one with the tongue. Achin took it slow when he placed the Dog’s left index finger in his shears, and he squeezed very slowly. He could hear the cracking of shattering bone, the drops of blood, the muffled screams, the sweetest music a human could hear. When he moved to the right hand, he remembered the many times he had seen it salute in the way nazi’s did. Achin took special joy in taking of these fingers. One by one. Shattering bone, blooddrops and screams all over again. Achin let a tear over the magnificent beauty of it all when he put the fingers in a little finger jar.

He gave the dog another fifteen minutes to recover.

This time, Achin took the chainsaw. It surprised him how hard a man could squeal when his legs were getting ripped away from the torso with an unrelenting chainsaw. A lot more blood soaked the bed than it had ever done before, and without either the drugs or the spare blood packs, the Dog would have already died, Achin knew. After every leg, he took great care to burn each vein shut with a rusty blowtorch.

The Dog was still wide awake. All of his brain functions were telling him to pass out, telling him to give up, telling him to die. But the drugs wouldn’t let him. He was going to stay awake. Whether he liked to or not. Both of his legs were now placed in an old steel barrel, disposed of as trash.

Achin continued to remove the left arm. The gross sounds made him remember how the German army first marched into his village. The flesh being violently cut resembled a thousand stomping boots in the mud. Once again, he burned the veins shut. When both arms were finally removed, Achin walked out of the room.

The old Jewish doctor had seen a lot of blood and wounds, but this much gore had made him sick. After drinking a glass of water and thirty minutes of rest, he came back.

He saw the Dog. All that remained was a torso and a head. It was crying. Achin smiled when he saw the tears on the face of whom he had always seen as Death itself. The thing had been awake for all this time, not allowed to die, not even allowed to pass out. He had seen it all happen, just as Achin did. Very, very slowly.

A man that was unable to speak, or perform any action in general, was one to be pitied. But Achin enjoyed every bit of what he saw. His plan almost complete.

He opened a toolbox, the Dog weakly and inaudibly mumbled something. Achin picked a small silver object from the box. It was something he had always kept close after returning to his hometown. When he had found his mother’s corpse, she had still had a silver spoon tightly in her hand. Achin had taken it from her, while he promised to avenge her.

The old silver utensil was dear to him, the last thing to remind him of the past. To remind him of what he did all of this for. It felt like the silver thing was always made for this single purpose. It gauged out one eyeball, rather easily. It was still attached by a nerve and a vein though. At least most of the muscle had come loose. Achin cut the vein and the nerve with a pair of scissors, dropping the eyeball on the floor. The thing looked horrified when the spoon came into range of the second eye. It tried to move, but the chains were still locked tight. Another pull. Another cut. Another eyeball on the floor.

Five minutes until the bleeding stopped.

The thing couldn’t move, couldn’t speak or taste, couldn’t see. But Achin wasn’t done yet. He powered up his drill and brought it close to the Dog’s ear. It moved a bit, scared. The drill entered his ear canal, causing some minor bleedings, until it reached its ear drum. The drill, made to penetrate wood, effortlessly cut through it. Achin showed regret as to the effectiveness of the tool he had picked. If only he had found something more painful, something that took longer, something that was more... enjoyable to him.

But it didn’t matter now. One more ear remained. The last sense apart from basic feeling, the last way the pile of flesh could still make sense of what was happening. Achin had thought he wouldn’t, but now he felt it was time. He leaned in closer, together with the drill and whispered in the Dog’s ear: it would seem that I am the one to have found more ways, better ways to destroy a man without killing him.

Even though the face was red of blood, and the eyes were now two gaping holes, he saw how the Dog finally recognized who Achin was. He saw that the Dog realized he had had it coming since he butchered this man’s life. Achin pushed the drill one final time, making the Dog never hear again.

After an hour of closing open wounds and administering more blood, the Dog was stable again. Achin put all the amputated pieces into the large barrel and soaked it with gasoline, burning it so it would never be found.

The remains of what was once the Nazi officer was put into a basket, and brought back to its cell. Achin attached a machine to the IV, that would automatically administer liquid food and some water into the body. He had devised it as a final part of his machinations. The Dog would remain living for maybe ten or twenty more years. Alone in his mind, unable to speak, see, hear or move. He could contemplate on what he has done. Achin would stay here, his sole purpose in this life was now to keep the Dog alive, to keep him suffering.

And eventually, the Dog will realize that in the end... he deserved it all.

  This was a mistake. In my fantasy it was like being a bird- I would fly over the skyscrapers and trees and oceans. Maybe I'd even sing like a bird for pure joy of elevation, and the tiny pushpin people below would wave up at me and say, "There goes a brilliant man". But I was wrong to the point of hilarity. Even now as I sit, a wreck of a human being, I laugh. It hurts but I laugh. I used to say it was hope, incredible hope that lead me to begin my manufacturing. Hope that I would break the world. I'd be free, not just by the metal wings, but by everyone crying my name to the heavens. But it was not hope, it was naivety. Everyone's a little naive I think, but I never once, never even once, wondered what would happen to me should this go wrong. I never said don't, never took the word from others either. So please do not try and comfort me when I tell you what happened. I really was a fool, and it really was all my fault. 

   It stared out as a premise many have had, to fly. I wanted the Personal Airplane, the human mounted wings that would take us up into the clouds and we could feel it all. The sky had not belonged to the birds for hundreds of years now, what argument did anyone have at this point? I wanted them to be elegant. I wanted speed and precision. I wanted people to improve them, paint them, make them into different styles, hell, monogram them. The first ones I made were hawk wings. I'd been sponsored by Bluefuel, a new oil with twice the effectiveness of gasoline, and their logo was a hawk, so I found it fitting. The engines for initial dismount mostly, but hidden cleverly within the feathers. I even got the oxygen mask to fit easily between the sides, where it was accessible but out of the way. Because here's the thing, the thing that burrows into my head like an obsessive worm, that makes me hate the damn thing with a passion even more than my love for it: it worked. Our test dummies flew into the air like angels. But after only a couple test drives, the harness always snapped. We tried everything. It should've been easy to make a harness, but the thing was so big and heavy, everything we tried just crashed the machine. We thought it to be tighter to avoid the smoke, but nothing we tried could get it close enough. We were out of ideas, no materials, clips, nothing worked. 

  I could see it all falling apart. The money, the time, the love I put into this machine was all going to be wasted. Just another worthless project, forgotten by time, a failure. But that dangerous thought, that maybe if I attached it to my own skin and bones, the wings would stay on. That, if they were ingrained in my very being, they would work. Understand that I was desperate. It was as if it was my child, a child I could not let plummet and die. The first sign of doom was the doctor I got one off some site with virus filled pop up ads. On the day we chose I even went to a warehouse instead of a hospital, the same greasy warehouse I built the Personal Airplane in. I remember it was a beautiful clear day, 'a perfect day for flying' I called it as I walked into the warehouse. My tattooed doctor put me under- and it was then the mistake happened. The real mistake, I feel, was that I didn't answer my ringing cell phone first. The ringtone died away as I did.

  I woke up and it hurt. Even pumped full of morphine as I was, it hurt. I could feel it, so foreign and wrong, so wrong, pulsing around the swollen incisions. It was as if a insect had burrowed in my skin and nested. I could bear the weight I found, but it was laborious to move at all really. I had the doctor take a photograph of my back but I couldn't bear to look at it. I ran out in the spotless sunny day and found it heartless now. My shadow stretched before me like a stranger. I wasn't going to turn it on, but I found I couldn't resist. I turned to walk back to the warehouse, but I found it so unbearable to go through those doors again. So when I flipped my ON switch, it was almost an unconscious decision. 

  My feet did not leave the ground, but I felt it move. My stitches ripped along it, spilling blood down unto the pavement. My ribs shifted up in my chest, followed by a sharp snap. I threw the switch to OFF and crumpled. I automatically moved to rip the wings down over my head, but I felt my bones lurch within my body. Instead I clawed wildly, pulling my hands down my bloodstained metal feathers, snapping my nails in the grooves. My hand went back to the switch, wanting it off me so bad...

  But at least I was together right? I was not dead. A broken rib maybe. But I was okay. I was okay right? I tried to control my breathing. I checked my pulse like a good scientist. I sat on the sun-baked pavement for a while. The wings grew boiling hot and burned my skin but I couldn't bring myself to do anything. I called out for my doctor. He emerged and wordlessly handed me my telephone, avoiding the blood on the pavement. It was some inconsequential colleague.

  "It turns out it wasn't the harness at all" he says, light, casual. Apparently he doesn't know. The blood from my broken nail trickles delicately down my wrist. "Apparently Bluefuel had extremely powerful radiation, corrosive to everything. The metal's infused to the brim with it all."

  "That makes sense." I said quietly. He didn't hear me but I ignore his questions. It did make sense. We had tried every harness. It explains why my metal burns have already blistered.

  "You still there? How did we not check for radiation? It's just lucky we didn't try it on anyone alive."

  Don't miss me. It is all my fault, so please do not burden yourselves. I've chronicled all I can, I think. I hope you... learned I suppose? I don't know what else you could gain besides severe warning. My life needs to mean something, so that's what I'm going to think. But you know, this ending doesn't have to be tragic. I'm still naive. Perhaps, for a moment, I'll fly.