The Nature of My Decomposition
Part One--WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT, BODY HORROR, BLOOD AND GORE
I am certain that nearly every human alive on this earth has a degree of infection running through their veins. I have watched countless elderly coughing blood and rotting tissue into handkerchiefs while vehemently denying their inevitable doom. Sometimes I wish that I could live in such blissful ignorance, that I was not acutely aware of the decay festering in each open abscess on my skin.
Every day my classmates jeer and leer at me, poking fun at my pockmarked face. I stay sane by reminding myself that if this apocalypse ever ends, at least I will have kept my head. At least, what's left of it beneath the rotting flesh.
I hunched my shoulders and kept my head low. The greasy curtain of my dark hair hid my decay from the curious stares of passersby. The school's lunchroom was buzzing like a nest of exceptionally annoying hornets. I am once again stabbed by the painful reminder that I should have already graduated by now. I was about to turn nineteen, repeating my senior year for failing two of my classes. One was an art class of all things and the other Spanish class. I didn't deserve the failure for art, but in Spanish, I shamefully admit I truly flunked.
I suppose it was fair that Ms. Bradshaw didn't understand my art. Presenting a sculpture painted with one's own blood to a person who does not know they're already dead would definitely come as a shock.
We live in the end-times now, the sun on the cusp of exploding into a Red Giant and engulfing the world below in flame. I've heard the older generations talk about how the sky used to still be a faint shade of blue before the pollution wiped out the last bit of cerulean with smog.
Despite our inevitable destruction, the cogs of human civilization turn on, animated by nothing but this disease that pulls the strings on our puppet-corpses. Nature gifted us one last hope, however. You see, there are two types of undead. There is the kind who operate on autopilot, higher functions erased by the thing living inside them. My current theory for this type is a fungal parasite - but who can say if the Powers That Be continue to keep it a secret from civilians? The other kind, like myself, have kept their humanity at the cost of their bodily integrity. I am surprised I've made it as far as I have with my sluggish healing and rotting flesh, yet I still manage to function in society without (quite literally) falling apart. Despite my tenacity for survival, I doubt I will live for much longer.
I watch the janitor from the corner of my eye; he is methodically cleaning the same spot on the floor over and over again. His dull eyes are a clear sign that his brain activity ceased at the moment of his death. The last sparks between his synapses move his limbs in a pantomime of the paths of motion they followed in life.
The bell rings; the horde shudders once before rising in a cacophony of saliva and shouting. I wait for a few moments, observing their raucous behavior before I follow suit. My eyes flick between my fellow sentient classmates who walk with purpose, mouth shut, and mind turned on. They swim against the current, jostled by elbows and shins, rot against rot, flesh against flesh. In the crowd, we are all the same, a river of meat to be feasted on by the carrion birds.
I push my way through the brainless and tumble into my next class - art class, take two. Thankfully, I had a different teacher to traumatize this time. She was a bit more open to my more grotesque works, though I caught flickers of fear in her eyes once or twice on some of the more gory pieces. It was at least preferable to the low grades and disgust I was rewarded with last year.
This week, we were working on something I equally loved and hated - self-portraits. I hated them because the curtain that hung in front of everyone's eyes was so clearly visible in the art that my fellow corpses made. Sickly grey hands sketched out rosy, blood-filled faces. Rotten odors drift from the very same artists that proudly hold up illustrations of picture-perfect girls smiling with solid, healthy white bones nestled in their jaws. Worse still, when I drew an accurate image of myself, I was met with the ridicule that I did not give in to the collective delusion. I would painstakingly draw every pustule and scar, every permanent wound and sign of decay, to be met with laughter. I was called a freak for 'accentuating' my 'acne.' I knew better than to try and correct them. I didn't particularly want to be sent to that place they had the audacity to call a 'psych ward.' Sentient ones who flew a little too close to the sun were sent to have the truth beat out of them. I know better than to open my mouth. Everyone knows, but no one can speak about it. It's maddening, but I try to let the knowledge that we are all in the know be my comfort in these dark times.
Today, the class was instructed to work on charcoal drawings. The teacher, Ms. Godfrey, was young as Ms. Bradshaw had been, but she was less jaded. She still had the naive optimism of a graduate with the whole world spread out before her. I longed for the ability to be so blind to the apocalypse.
The chalkboard behind her desk had ‘Grab some supplies!’ written in cheery curvy letters. A rubber-hose cartoon face in blue and red outlines grinned cheekily down at me. I resisted the urge to frown at it and selected a piece of paper and a handful of charcoal. There were no desks in the art room, just five round tables forcing us to observe each other whether we wanted to or not. I usually sat in my chair backward to avoid the judgmental gaze of my peers on days we were not actively working on projects. I chose the table closest to the front which usually remained empty. Chairs were dragged along the floor to the furthest tables, shrill scraping noises drowning out Ms. Godfrey’s exasperated sigh that signaled the beginning of class.
I wish she had enough of a backbone to demand they pay attention and sit closer to the front, but alas, she was a meek twenty-something that was so thin a slight breeze would have made her crumple like a ball of paper. Her withering was not unique to the undead disease, but it still came as a shock to me sometimes when the light would hit the sharp bones of her face just right.
I wasted no time beginning my sketch, the bud of an idea already beginning to blossom in my mind. I was forever grateful that my mental faculties had remained intact. Whatever uncaring god might exist had at least thrown me that bone to chew on. I decided to flesh out my foster mother’s small dog onto the page, unfortunately not spared from the undead illness. He was riddled with sores and warts that the woman claimed were normal conditions for small dog breeds. Though I understood her reasoning, I could not agree with her. The erosion of the flesh is never normal, it simply cannot be. I pulled the charcoal away from the corner of the dog’s eyes and gently smudged it with my thumb. A sharper edge of the black stick traced the lines of the blood vessels that had exploded at the red and angry inner corners.
I sensed Ms. Godfrey before I saw her, hovering over my right shoulder to watch me work. I allowed the knowledge of her presence to pass over me like a cloud, refusing to allow anything to make my hands twitch. Once I’d fleshed out the general shape of tiny Tony the Yorkie mix, I added the mottled skin, the sores, and the marks that made me feel a certain level of kinship to the creature despite how irritating he was.
“Wow, that’s some…detail, Owen.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyeballs up into their sockets in case she would see my face from her angle. Turning my head to check and risking eye contact didn’t sound appealing at that moment, either.
“Now I’ve had some kids draw uh, fur personas? But this is very deep, a very different level, well done.”
The sludge that passed for blood in my body seemed to coagulate further, slowing, advancing the rigor mortis by leaps and bounds, and freezing me in place in my chair. I was dimly aware that the general hubbub of the classroom was quieting, eyes turning to observe my latest humiliating presentation to the class.
“You think this is me?” I couldn’t bring my voice above a whisper and Ms. Godfrey had already picked up momentum, too late to stop herself from her deluge of misguided praise.
There are awkward moments when a flicker of group consciousness passes through a horde of the undead and at that moment, whether we were unconscious or not before, we are all acutely aware of what is going on. This was one such moment where eyes filled with sudden clarity snapped their focus onto me.
The collective mockery and words whispered behind their hands were like nails driven into my dying flesh. Very few things outside of my own rot turn my stomach, but the revolting nature of society as we fall apart is enough to make me severely queasy. Even now we gather in groups and poke our fellow dying with sticks like the inquisitive animalistic primates we have always been. Intelligence was a mistake wasted on our species.
A loud crack in my hand drags my attention away from the drawing, away from Ms. Godfrey gushing about how art is such a perfect dive into the soul, that it can be therapeutic and healing even, away from my classmates who had caught onto the joke before she had, away from this joke of a life as the charcoal stick crumbled into pieces in my angry grip.
Ms. Godfrey’s jaw clacked shut so loudly I’m surprised she didn’t break it off its hinges. The class suddenly noticed that the victim of its torture was shaking with rage, my skin flushing red with the very last of my blood cells trying to fuel my fight or flight response hormones that weakly trickled into my body.
I breathed in deep through my nostrils, once, then breathed slowly out my mouth, once.
“This dog lives in the house I live in currently,” I kept my voice as level and monotone as I could manage given my current situation.
My refusal to give in to their animalistic ritual of humiliation made the gawking onlookers quickly lose interest. The ones with half a mind left to use utilized their intelligence to make pretty pictures plucked from the fragments of their memories, scrawled onto the paper; the others made a mess of the supplies and chattered meaningless garbage to each other.
Ms. Godfrey took a moment to unstick herself. Though she was conscious like me, the rot had clearly sunk its claws into her grey matter, nibbling at the edges of her fragile mind. The wheels of the classroom slowly but surely began to roll again, the incident forgotten to the muck that society had become. High school was merely a microcosm of a world more horrific than even this.