Spoon
Abel held the spoon out in front of him, basin downward, his fist in the air waiting, as though to be bumped by a comrade's. His eyes were round and open wide, watching, staring, measuring the curve of the spoon, the whiteness of the lack of blood over his knuckles, the tremble so subtly beginning that only he could see it because he could also feel it. The village in his head was in such a commotion that the commotion of the cafeteria around him was simply negligible. He was learning.
"DROP THE SPOON!" Said one voice, wanting to hear the clatter he knew he could anticipate. Physics were so simple, children's games where all the lines are scripted, but you always say them anyway. "If you don't drop that spoon soon, I'll knock--"
"It's going to curl up into dust in your hand if you keep squeezing tightly enough," said another. The metal was hard and warm on his skin, and while Abel knew with his logic that the spoon was most likely to remain a spoon, this voice... sounded so informed. Like he knew something Abel didn't. He does know something Abel doesn't. What is it? Dust. This voice knows dust, and air, and the subtle things all around that no one seems to care for.
"Let's go outside." These words bounce around the village in all the voices sometimes. One voice, younger, and much older, than all the rest pleads this simple request. Abel could see the windows along the wall farthest from him in his peripherals, the sunlight cast outside reflecting in through the glass like a cool caress, soft and coercive. He could see the vivid greenery, the striking azure and baby blues, textured by brush stroked cirrus. He knew there was life out there, as he remembered in the background of his mind the pill he swallowed with magic inside that allowed him to walk through the walls of the safe house, and he could almost feel the blades of grass tickling his bare feet as his toes gripped the hard plastic tiles. He could feel the air moving in the stale and stagnant room like wind, although it was only the slight whoosh of another human as they walked by, hurrying off to eat, work, to plug in.
Abel was distinctly disconnected, and he knew he'd done this to himself when he swallowed that pill--but the windows had become so tempting, he couldn't bring himself to think of anything else. He'd gone to a deep recess of the safe house, rooms in the basement with hallways between them that so few used that many didn't even know they existed. He knew though. He went there and spoke with someone who remained in the shadows as though they feared the light, all in hushed tones, knowing that if the man inside the loud speakers saw with his supposedly all-seeing eyes all over the community, everything would be smoothed out, illuminated, filled with the bustle of what passes as "life" inside this concrete cage.
A jostle rocked through Abel's body, catapulting him back from about four different distant places, all straight back into himself, in the cafeteria, with the spoon in his outstretched fist. Despite all the noise around him, the clattering of the spoon to the ground when his grip was loosened rang in his ears as an echo down the caves of his ear canals, the depths of the void inside him. Someone had bumped him in a moment of negligence, who promptly placed an unwelcome hand on his upper arm, saying "Oh, sorry!" And moving along as though it were as insignificant of an interaction as it was. Abel watched the not-so-strange stranger stride away, the dirt brown of her jeans blending with the lighter tan of her shirt as well as with all the many other bodies around them. She disappeared as quickly as she appeared, as quickly as everything changes and remains the same in this wretched place.
Abandoning the study of his spoon altogether, Abel somberly walked towards the windows he longed for more from, people passing in front of and behind him as though he were an empty space, tables on either side of him as if they had parted to make way for him, although they were bolted to the floor. He stopped at the same point he always did, a single pace from the cold white concrete, close enough to reach out to touch the glass if he wanted to, and somehow, for the first time, he did.
With his hand in the air again, the commotion and bustle reached a crescendo as a quaint ding signified that lunch was no longer being served and it was time to return to duties. He knew no one would notice his absence from the sheltered courtyard where he swept every day alongside so many who looked so much like him, much like how they never noticed when he was there. He stood in front of the window as the cafeteria slowly emptied out like an hourglass signifying it was time to switch, to flip things over and start again. He was so tired of bouncing back and forth between the same things all the time though. The only thing that broke up the monotony was his little village, raging against itself, against the world Abel lived in, shouting commands, making unkind commentary with laughter, asking questions that often simply had no answers. He listened for a moment to their chatter increase in volume as the silence in the room grew when he realized he'd frozen mid-reach.
Something occurred to him as he held this pose he often stood in, and he observed the lack of shine on the glass--or the lack of texture altogether. Had he ever actually touched the glass? He could remember pressing his nose to it as a child, when his mother would yank his hand along as she tried to get him to just eat. He remembered the cold of the material, so much like the cold of the concrete walls, and he could feel the fragility of the breakable semi-liquid as he pressed his palm to it, despite his still-reaching fingers. Suddenly he was gripped by fear, and the village fell almost silent, save for the anxious groans and expressive huffs of breath without lungs. A familiar word was being hushed in the back of his mind, in the environment of the village, which soon permeated the voices that had also been made quiet for once. It was the clatter of the fallen spoon, still on the cafeteria floor somewhere behind him, returning as the same echo that was lost inside him, but in reverse. The vibrations of the sounds accumulated and concentrated until they were in the voices of the village, whispering first, then conversing, and then shouting and screaming, a calamitous celebration doused with anxiety and a view of the unknown known.
"Outside.. outside, outside, let's go outside!"
"Outside! Outside!"
"COME ON! Outside! Outside, outsideoutsidesoutsideoutside!"
"LETS GO OUTSIDE!"
"OUTSIDE!"
"OUTSIDE!" Abel's fingers passed the threshold where the glass should have been, and he was being carried forward by something that felt like him, but also felt much bigger and stronger than him. A sound in his ears catapulted him by his arms through the window headfirst as a breaching alarm blared through the speakers of the safe house, and the cross section that normally held the four panes in place in the window bent and fell away like straws, all but floating as the metal fell to the dirt and grass just outside the building.
He'd been outside before, the one time, but this felt very different. When he'd swallowed that pill, it carried him on a transcendental wave that passed through solid matter like air, and he was safe. It was a journey of self-discovery, and when the pill was done, he woke again in the same twin size bed he woke in every morning, as if nothing had happened save but in his mind. Like a shell, the pill had been protecting him as he wandered over the grass, between shrubs and bushes, and among the trees who sang a beautiful cacophony of birdsong. This time, with the alarm blaring behind him, he knew he could not go back, though he didn't understand why.
The grass felt taller this time, and much more needy. He was running, and despite how briefly each footfall rested on the bed of green, the blades seemed to reach for him, wrapping themselves around his toes, and the village was back to it's usual chaos, overlapping dialogue, rapid fire questions without answers, and while the negative space left by the lack of answers was nothing new, it held a fresh and raw sense of crippling ignorance now. What would he do once he reached the trees? They looked so much denser this time, and were there always so many vines between them? What happened to the round little shrubs, now weighted with fruit so red and so plump that as he passed them at full speed, he almost slipped a time or two on the juices of split skins of fruit over-ripe and uneaten.
Something jabbed sharply into the edge of one foot, and Brian fell forward in a clumsy somersault, twigs and branches whipping him on all sides as he rolled into the woods that had become a jungle as if by magic. When, after an unusually long fall, he finally came to rest flat on his back, he opened his tear-filled eyes to stare into the canopy of leaves and vines over him and breathe. His chest heaved up and down at an alarming rate to match his heartbeat, and he let out a shuddering sob, curling onto his side in the fetal position. The sounds of the blaring alarm at the safe house was so distant now, it might as well have been an illusion before it stopped completely. The silence that followed in this jungle was deafening, nothing like the rare silence in his head, and even less like the silence in the safe house, which he had often craved so desperately he would sit in blackness for the sake of it. This silence wasn't silence at all, the shrieks of birds no longer harmonious, and the wind rustling the leaves was waves crashing over to drown him.
The ground cover under the trees was still grass-like, but each blade was thick and juicy, long, and seemed to have a mind of it's own. Curled up on the ground the way he was, he could feel the grass stretching over him, cutting into his skin and squeezing. The cut on his foot throbbed and he felt something poke it tentatively. He recoiled as much as he could, and hugged his knees tightly, but the prodding repeated and worsened. He sobbed again and continued trying to just breathe, in, and out, in and--the pain was too much. He was squeezing his knees so tightly, the vines were covering and gripping him so hard, he felt that if he exhaled it might be his last, so he just hung there with air in his lungs, suspended. The movement of the grass was suspended as well, and everything was suddenly still.
Almost a minute had passed before Abel felt his hunger for breath. Trembling, he prepared himself for what cam next, opening his mouth but not his throat, and then... taking in just a little more, before relaxing and allowing the air to leave him. He was deeply surprised by the reaction of the vines, where they recoiled slightly, and gave him room to move. It was such a relief that he laid himself out again, spread eagle. The greenery around him still had it's grips on his body, but he could now feel the need of the roots for him. It was odd the way it felt right, to give himself to them. He knew he was bleeding, and the throb of the would was ever present, but it was more like bloodletting than a stumbled wound.
He sat up slowly and looked around a moment, and would have been startled if not for how familiar all the peering pairs of glowing eyes in the woods and jungle around him seemed. They knew him. At first they appeared to be animals, up in trees, low to the ground, but as he felt the vines and grass reach over and around his legs, crossed on the ground, each pair of eyes began to level with each other and he finally realized that it had become night, and the eyes were the only source of light accessible to him. They were the inhabitants of his village, and they were here to bring him... home?
When Abel looked back down, his legs were buried in the dirt under the grass, like they weren't his anymore. It felt better that way. His hands laid out on either side of him soon disappeared as well, and for some reason, this dissolving of his body was a source of peace. The eyes of his villagers encroached upon him, and he welcomed them back in, beckoning, "Come look." He used his eyes to refer to his disappearing corpse. "Come and have some." They obliged.
If anyone else had been watching, it would have looked like a pack of wolves, a leopard, some carnivorous creature violently consuming him with an expression of complete fulfillment on his face. To anyone else, this would have appeared as the utter destruction of a human, of a life. But inside him, past all the fear, past the concrete walls, past the spoon still on the floor in the cafeteria he'd escaped from, this was where Abel belonged, intrinsically, in essence. Pieces of him began to float away as they were carried by the bellies of other creatures, as they sank into the roots of the trees and vines and the shrubs with the over ripe fruits. Connected once again to the place he knew he came from, Abel finally got to go outside, and this is what it was. Reckless abandon. Perfect balance. The consumption of death as an experience of completion. Transcendence. He was the spoon that curled into dust in his own, white-knuckled grip.
In the final moments before his brain was consumed, Abel remembered watching others from the community being sent outside when their time was due, crowd clad in black, sniveling tears falling, in so much somber sobriety. In these moments, even in the darkness, he could not have been happier that now that he was outside, there was no mourning, and no black was worn. He was in full, vivid, real life color.
"DROP THE SPOON!" Said one voice, wanting to hear the clatter he knew he could anticipate. Physics were so simple, children's games where all the lines are scripted, but you always say them anyway. "If you don't drop that spoon soon, I'll knock--"
"It's going to curl up into dust in your hand if you keep squeezing tightly enough," said another. The metal was hard and warm on his skin, and while Abel knew with his logic that the spoon was most likely to remain a spoon, this voice... sounded so informed. Like he knew something Abel didn't. He does know something Abel doesn't. What is it? Dust. This voice knows dust, and air, and the subtle things all around that no one seems to care for.
"Let's go outside." These words bounce around the village in all the voices sometimes. One voice, younger, and much older, than all the rest pleads this simple request. Abel could see the windows along the wall farthest from him in his peripherals, the sunlight cast outside reflecting in through the glass like a cool caress, soft and coercive. He could see the vivid greenery, the striking azure and baby blues, textured by brush stroked cirrus. He knew there was life out there, as he remembered in the background of his mind the pill he swallowed with magic inside that allowed him to walk through the walls of the safe house, and he could almost feel the blades of grass tickling his bare feet as his toes gripped the hard plastic tiles. He could feel the air moving in the stale and stagnant room like wind, although it was only the slight whoosh of another human as they walked by, hurrying off to eat, work, to plug in.
Abel was distinctly disconnected, and he knew he'd done this to himself when he swallowed that pill--but the windows had become so tempting, he couldn't bring himself to think of anything else. He'd gone to a deep recess of the safe house, rooms in the basement with hallways between them that so few used that many didn't even know they existed. He knew though. He went there and spoke with someone who remained in the shadows as though they feared the light, all in hushed tones, knowing that if the man inside the loud speakers saw with his supposedly all-seeing eyes all over the community, everything would be smoothed out, illuminated, filled with the bustle of what passes as "life" inside this concrete cage.
A jostle rocked through Abel's body, catapulting him back from about four different distant places, all straight back into himself, in the cafeteria, with the spoon in his outstretched fist. Despite all the noise around him, the clattering of the spoon to the ground when his grip was loosened rang in his ears as an echo down the caves of his ear canals, the depths of the void inside him. Someone had bumped him in a moment of negligence, who promptly placed an unwelcome hand on his upper arm, saying "Oh, sorry!" And moving along as though it were as insignificant of an interaction as it was. Abel watched the not-so-strange stranger stride away, the dirt brown of her jeans blending with the lighter tan of her shirt as well as with all the many other bodies around them. She disappeared as quickly as she appeared, as quickly as everything changes and remains the same in this wretched place.
Abandoning the study of his spoon altogether, Abel somberly walked towards the windows he longed for more from, people passing in front of and behind him as though he were an empty space, tables on either side of him as if they had parted to make way for him, although they were bolted to the floor. He stopped at the same point he always did, a single pace from the cold white concrete, close enough to reach out to touch the glass if he wanted to, and somehow, for the first time, he did.
With his hand in the air again, the commotion and bustle reached a crescendo as a quaint ding signified that lunch was no longer being served and it was time to return to duties. He knew no one would notice his absence from the sheltered courtyard where he swept every day alongside so many who looked so much like him, much like how they never noticed when he was there. He stood in front of the window as the cafeteria slowly emptied out like an hourglass signifying it was time to switch, to flip things over and start again. He was so tired of bouncing back and forth between the same things all the time though. The only thing that broke up the monotony was his little village, raging against itself, against the world Abel lived in, shouting commands, making unkind commentary with laughter, asking questions that often simply had no answers. He listened for a moment to their chatter increase in volume as the silence in the room grew when he realized he'd frozen mid-reach.
Something occurred to him as he held this pose he often stood in, and he observed the lack of shine on the glass--or the lack of texture altogether. Had he ever actually touched the glass? He could remember pressing his nose to it as a child, when his mother would yank his hand along as she tried to get him to just eat. He remembered the cold of the material, so much like the cold of the concrete walls, and he could feel the fragility of the breakable semi-liquid as he pressed his palm to it, despite his still-reaching fingers. Suddenly he was gripped by fear, and the village fell almost silent, save for the anxious groans and expressive huffs of breath without lungs. A familiar word was being hushed in the back of his mind, in the environment of the village, which soon permeated the voices that had also been made quiet for once. It was the clatter of the fallen spoon, still on the cafeteria floor somewhere behind him, returning as the same echo that was lost inside him, but in reverse. The vibrations of the sounds accumulated and concentrated until they were in the voices of the village, whispering first, then conversing, and then shouting and screaming, a calamitous celebration doused with anxiety and a view of the unknown known.
"Outside.. outside, outside, let's go outside!"
"Outside! Outside!"
"COME ON! Outside! Outside, outsideoutsidesoutsideoutside!"
"LETS GO OUTSIDE!"
"OUTSIDE!"
"OUTSIDE!" Abel's fingers passed the threshold where the glass should have been, and he was being carried forward by something that felt like him, but also felt much bigger and stronger than him. A sound in his ears catapulted him by his arms through the window headfirst as a breaching alarm blared through the speakers of the safe house, and the cross section that normally held the four panes in place in the window bent and fell away like straws, all but floating as the metal fell to the dirt and grass just outside the building.
He'd been outside before, the one time, but this felt very different. When he'd swallowed that pill, it carried him on a transcendental wave that passed through solid matter like air, and he was safe. It was a journey of self-discovery, and when the pill was done, he woke again in the same twin size bed he woke in every morning, as if nothing had happened save but in his mind. Like a shell, the pill had been protecting him as he wandered over the grass, between shrubs and bushes, and among the trees who sang a beautiful cacophony of birdsong. This time, with the alarm blaring behind him, he knew he could not go back, though he didn't understand why.
The grass felt taller this time, and much more needy. He was running, and despite how briefly each footfall rested on the bed of green, the blades seemed to reach for him, wrapping themselves around his toes, and the village was back to it's usual chaos, overlapping dialogue, rapid fire questions without answers, and while the negative space left by the lack of answers was nothing new, it held a fresh and raw sense of crippling ignorance now. What would he do once he reached the trees? They looked so much denser this time, and were there always so many vines between them? What happened to the round little shrubs, now weighted with fruit so red and so plump that as he passed them at full speed, he almost slipped a time or two on the juices of split skins of fruit over-ripe and uneaten.
Something jabbed sharply into the edge of one foot, and Brian fell forward in a clumsy somersault, twigs and branches whipping him on all sides as he rolled into the woods that had become a jungle as if by magic. When, after an unusually long fall, he finally came to rest flat on his back, he opened his tear-filled eyes to stare into the canopy of leaves and vines over him and breathe. His chest heaved up and down at an alarming rate to match his heartbeat, and he let out a shuddering sob, curling onto his side in the fetal position. The sounds of the blaring alarm at the safe house was so distant now, it might as well have been an illusion before it stopped completely. The silence that followed in this jungle was deafening, nothing like the rare silence in his head, and even less like the silence in the safe house, which he had often craved so desperately he would sit in blackness for the sake of it. This silence wasn't silence at all, the shrieks of birds no longer harmonious, and the wind rustling the leaves was waves crashing over to drown him.
The ground cover under the trees was still grass-like, but each blade was thick and juicy, long, and seemed to have a mind of it's own. Curled up on the ground the way he was, he could feel the grass stretching over him, cutting into his skin and squeezing. The cut on his foot throbbed and he felt something poke it tentatively. He recoiled as much as he could, and hugged his knees tightly, but the prodding repeated and worsened. He sobbed again and continued trying to just breathe, in, and out, in and--the pain was too much. He was squeezing his knees so tightly, the vines were covering and gripping him so hard, he felt that if he exhaled it might be his last, so he just hung there with air in his lungs, suspended. The movement of the grass was suspended as well, and everything was suddenly still.
Almost a minute had passed before Abel felt his hunger for breath. Trembling, he prepared himself for what cam next, opening his mouth but not his throat, and then... taking in just a little more, before relaxing and allowing the air to leave him. He was deeply surprised by the reaction of the vines, where they recoiled slightly, and gave him room to move. It was such a relief that he laid himself out again, spread eagle. The greenery around him still had it's grips on his body, but he could now feel the need of the roots for him. It was odd the way it felt right, to give himself to them. He knew he was bleeding, and the throb of the would was ever present, but it was more like bloodletting than a stumbled wound.
He sat up slowly and looked around a moment, and would have been startled if not for how familiar all the peering pairs of glowing eyes in the woods and jungle around him seemed. They knew him. At first they appeared to be animals, up in trees, low to the ground, but as he felt the vines and grass reach over and around his legs, crossed on the ground, each pair of eyes began to level with each other and he finally realized that it had become night, and the eyes were the only source of light accessible to him. They were the inhabitants of his village, and they were here to bring him... home?
When Abel looked back down, his legs were buried in the dirt under the grass, like they weren't his anymore. It felt better that way. His hands laid out on either side of him soon disappeared as well, and for some reason, this dissolving of his body was a source of peace. The eyes of his villagers encroached upon him, and he welcomed them back in, beckoning, "Come look." He used his eyes to refer to his disappearing corpse. "Come and have some." They obliged.
If anyone else had been watching, it would have looked like a pack of wolves, a leopard, some carnivorous creature violently consuming him with an expression of complete fulfillment on his face. To anyone else, this would have appeared as the utter destruction of a human, of a life. But inside him, past all the fear, past the concrete walls, past the spoon still on the floor in the cafeteria he'd escaped from, this was where Abel belonged, intrinsically, in essence. Pieces of him began to float away as they were carried by the bellies of other creatures, as they sank into the roots of the trees and vines and the shrubs with the over ripe fruits. Connected once again to the place he knew he came from, Abel finally got to go outside, and this is what it was. Reckless abandon. Perfect balance. The consumption of death as an experience of completion. Transcendence. He was the spoon that curled into dust in his own, white-knuckled grip.
In the final moments before his brain was consumed, Abel remembered watching others from the community being sent outside when their time was due, crowd clad in black, sniveling tears falling, in so much somber sobriety. In these moments, even in the darkness, he could not have been happier that now that he was outside, there was no mourning, and no black was worn. He was in full, vivid, real life color.
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