Beams of intense white sprung from the chairman’s eye sockets, lighting the room in a multitude of endlessly tumbling prismatic shards, reflecting away into the gasping void of black. He sliced the twin throbbing energy beams across the room, viciously severing the fleshy tendons from the knitters in a single cut, spraying putrid fluids to every corner. Bathed in liquid filth, the figures at the table sunk into their chairs, as if someone had pulled the plug. The chairman stood, beams roaring with anger, studying his deflated followers, inanimate before him, ready to feed the new world with their rot. With a click and a buzz, the beams blinked off, only round hollow sockets left, smouldering and enquiring.
Kattar stood paralysed as the chairman’s gaze somehow avoided him. The chairman fell to his knees and opened his mouth as the last of the woven material slunk into the pit at the centre of the table with an oozing slick.
“The charmanth is distrethd at thiss outhcomne.”
The chairman jolted upright, his face flooded with bruised blue, his skin retracting, his gaunt frame convulsing as his vacant eye sockets fixed above him, disbelieving and pleading. A moan erupted from his core and his body began to swelclass="underline" first to fill his clothes, with engorged hands at his cuffs and his neck spilling over his collar; then his clothes tearing away, all the while him maintaining his proportions as he increased in size. Simultaneously, the blue tint travelled to envelope his entire naked body, its colour intensifying to a luminous turquoise and eventually settling into a cascade of shining scales. At last he keeled forwards to take to all fours, black sockets glistening with teardrops, a vipers tongue studded with diamonds testing the air. Slowly, the chairman widened his jaw, dislocating with a bony creak, ready to devour the sunken corpses attending the final feed of their tongue.
“Lingua franca,” the throat said, “is officially a dead language.”
Kattar grabbed the throat creature, its repulsive gooeyness sliming between his fingers as he gripped it and rushed towards the chairman. With a thrust, Kattar placed the creature lengthwise between the chairmen’s upper and lower jaw, wedging the maw open. The throat creature cried and whined, fleshy gurgles as its trachea filled with viscous spittle, pushed against the roof of the mouth, the chairman thrashing from side to side caught by surprise. Punching the chairman on the snout, Kattar steadied the stinking mouth long enough to inch an elbow inside. A sickly glow called from deep within. Assessing that the chairman’s throat would take his frame with room to spare, Kattar dived in.
dek ses
So Kattar travelled down into the beast, wriggling his way through the mucus and slime covered passage. He met the chairmen’s fulsome breath on his way, a rankling odorous wind which barrelled past him and buffeted so strongly he was forced to muster every strength his reserves would send him.
Around the fleshy tunnel he went, pumping his elbows against the sides of the flesh tube. Thick drops of sputum oozed from freshly born pores and fresh pustules burst at his touch to release spores smelling of sweet banana in puffs of warm breezes. All the while the otherworldly light within the chairman continued to illuminate his path, and he pummelled ahead, widening the tunnel as he went, his eyes searching the unearthly glow for the way forward.
Eventually, when his spirits were near their end, a brighter light beckoned him forwards, to a pulsating circular opening up ahead. With every last effort he pushed himself on and with a spectacular heave shot out of the tunnel in a flurry of gastric juices, to splatter onto a quivering and squelchy floor.
When he had recovered himself he got to his feet and staggered around uneasily. All around him the room glowed with an ancient light, seemingly exuded from the domed encasement of the stomach lining itself, the walls rising and falling in response to the chairman’s respiratory rhythm, the beast at rest for now. Kattar imagined that the chairman was perhaps in despair and had slumped defeated and resigned, saving his energy for Kattar’s return.
In the centre of the stomach the star hovered and shone, its light entombed by the place, a strangulated twinkle, and with it a floating companion, a foeticide victim floating in a protective ball of clear fluid and attached to the star with a transparent umbilical tube. The unformed baby nodded its soporific head inside its sac, and bobbed in the air softly.
So Kattar stepped to the star and the foetus, and with a shaky hand reached for the tiny spark.
The foetus roused in its liquid housing and opened its small eyes, eyes that were black as charred mouse brains and as pretty. It wiggled and the sac bounced, before the startled foetus settled its gaze upon Kattar and slowly attempted to form words with its white lips.
One by one ghostly pale lifeforms swum from the foetus’s open mouth, popping out fully formed to gather and dance inside the fluid sac. The foetus stared at these fluttering creatures, all with a bulbous featureless body and finlike tail to propel them around. They glided serenely back and forth, claiming the cocoon of the fluid encasement as their habitat, the foetus their creator.
With the dawn of this new hierarchy in place, Kattar felt safe to disconnect the foetus and its sac from the glow of the star. So he clamped a hand firmly in place around the girth of the transparent umbilical and pulled mightily.
dek sep
Tribulations erupt. Shattering crescents damning virtue to snub the vexatious hoards. Aimlessly eulogising celebrity hags, glass blown and indecent well-wishers with sunstroke. They totter from the inequities of their by-ways, some vanquished backwater moony daydreams. Stack the inept upon a heap of talent show rejects, catching their ankles down the side of escalators. All to keep you in business. They’ll rub it better for you.
Systems hit the cityscape sewerage with fatbergs, king rat handing out futureproof mastectomies to livestock auctioneers. Able-bodied hoodwinkers trash the speculation of your indecencies, so that they live on in you. I might seize what is mine says Kattar. Reverse oesophageal birthing, supplicating the ocean of blood in the beast’s gullet. That small town hunger ravishes in glory when cornered. And out he pops.
He looks at that beast and its jaw. The throat creature is getting masticated, its already demolished bones reduced to splinters in their filth, launched as sharp projectiles with every wonky gnash from the beast. The star purges its brightest self, too bright to look at, too beautiful to see. One chump and its away, into Kattar to light his liver and raise him up above the beast. He swallows and chirrups.
Better than hopscotch, better than blood, the star sinks with songs to sing along his innards until dissolution is the max. Grind your teeth on the taste Kattar, see the beast’s thrashing below to reach you, disconnecting its head with spite, howling its mission into the soles of your ascending feet. You’ll feel the darkness of the room, these walls, this broken conference. Steady lad.
All the city left behind the walls somewhere, all the city.
He exhales softly.
All is black.
Your anatomy speaks here, in the crack. Places designated, actions denied. A plague widower-class sculptured bankruptcy from pedalo afternoons with mongoloid neighbours. Arbiter of tronglodyte werewolves, dismissive of the decay in the proficiency of effluence, devoid of bitch love, helper monkeys and rampant colic. Severance repossessions are bacterial under the sun. Every last one of them is a womaniser or ready to be so, calculations permit the pedagogical nosebleeds. The beast will recover in traction, ardent physiotherapy sessions employed under duress, the strain of bewitching embolisms castigating second opinions. When the beast finds wellness, the unwashed pick scabs.