...if you tore your eyes out.

Dark.

So dark you’d have to stop yourself from clawing your eyes out.

Yet it was his blanket - he’d coat himself in it’s thin oil-black veneer and hide away from shame, from judgement. His bones protruded and stretched his skin like a garbage bag being weighed down by the spines of roadside kills. Smelled of it too; New York sewer rats ripping each other apart during a famine oozed out of his trampoline skin, and the drunks puking and pissing in alleyways crusted his orange rind tongue.

Just a soot-covered scarecrow for a burnt down farm, left all alone except for the vermins and crows that gnaw and play with the moldy straws. They pecked and pecked until the bare blackened ground was lacerated by razor blades, each straw being etched into it, until the mournful wind howled and carried them away to some other place, leaving him empty.

Then there was a light.

So delicate, so petite he thought. These were words that rarely - if ever - found their place in his sickly head, and now they came the way dawn starts to break after a grueling winter hell that sealed the eyes when tears fell. The tiny dot of hope wavering in the horizon was fragile - yes - but it was the only pinprick of light that flickered in this maddening dark.

Dead December trees for limbs lumbered towards it relentlessly, like a wolf to a rabbit.

He ended up conjuring images of what it could be; Warmth for the cold... or something to make me feel whole again.

Yes... something to fill this agonizing emptiness.

This cold long dark...

He never chose this. Never wanted it. Something that just happened under the eyes of a hungover God. An unclean prototype that had darkness wedged in between the chains of his DNA and slithered around the coils, rotting the double helix away.

He embraced it - had to. Though a failed model, he still - unfortunately - had self-preservation built into those maimed wirings. Suicide was a good option, but the lizard brain always singed with the whining screech of unkept nails against a chalkboard

everytime he tied the noose or placed the blade just inches away from his wrist, veins pulsating and jutting out of his thin skin like highway routes on a map.

This was new. An unexpected variable.

A light.

He didn’t even know why he was trailing it. He didn’t need a reason to. Jusr knew that everyone up the chain of command were prodding at him to get closer to it. Moth to a flame.

Then he stood there, the blinding light just an arm’s length away, and scowled. The closer he was, the more the emptiness panged.

And so his reptilian cortex shot him a look of piano wire daggers and hummed with the rev of a dilapidated V8 car engine. It puppeteered his limbs and maw to rabidly tear into the light.

The engine was firing in all cylinders - oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine... The valve overflowed and the hormonal contents seeped through his flesh.

A vibrating rose-tainted throat swirled in his tongue. It wailed of banshees. He clamped his jaw shut. The sharp iron taste of blood bursted into his mouth. He drank and swallowed in a frenzy like a sun-dried man would at an oasis.

He moved on over to her shocked lips, slightly ajar. He bit down. Most of the teeth were crushed by the force, some clawed at his throat as it went, and a few were stuck in between his black-enameled teeth. The tongue was smooth and slicked on downwards at a slow snail pace. A cold fleshy watermelon blotted with seeds during a humid July.

Then he found himself with soft, warm, plump fat. Saved the best for last.

I deserve this he thought. His gore red id mixed with piss whipped up with the fluttering wings of a thousand Florida mosquitoes in agreement.

He gobbled the sun up. It died in his bowels and left a black hole.

Empty again.

And dark.

So dark you wouldn’t even know if you tore your eyes out.