My Nine Lives

Author: a Lyr

When I was younger, I was known to salivate at the mere thought of doing what you’re not supposed to. I enjoyed this so heavily that I would go to great lengths to alienate and offend other people. Thinking back, that misanthropy was much more rampant in my psychology than I gave it credit for. I digress

Several years ago I started to feel quite a bit more bored than usual. I was working a standard eccentric-type job and festering a piquant resentment toward the nettling I was at this time unnaturally accustomed to receiving from the self-styled weirdos coming through the store, never fucking mind that which the fucking normals mercilessly brought down upon me, and I was long past losing whatever slim semblance of cool I can usually muster. I retreated to the basement most days, and on my days off my subconscious was hard at work scouring the environs for prey.

Eventually I came across a diseased “artist”. He was being eaten alive by advanced lymphoma and another type of bone marrow cancer I can’t remember. What I initially enjoyed was not this revelation, however; his formidably grotesque appearance appealed to me on a level of mirth and vengeance difficult to put in specific. I shall now describe what he looked like.

He walked with a lurch as though he disdained to use a cane that was very much needed to support his stiffened limbs, which were episodically bulbous as if he had grown superfluous joints that some amateur surgeon once tried to fix in place. Though hairless from head to toe, his skin was thoroughly and deeply pockmarked which in the dark gave him a look of a haphazardly shorn ape. His various pills prevented him from eating hardly any food, except certain particulars he loved, and his cloudy yellowed eyes were so deeply sunken inside the brow that their muddy color most of the time resembled more closely blackish greys than mottled brown. He had a wound for a mouth and each one of his teeth, except the few in front, was wreathed with black fillings. (I would have liked to keep that set of teeth for myself. Unfortunately his devotion did not ascend to cranial extraction.)

I loved the way he smelled. It was like his body had been at the precipice of rot and at the critical hour was utterly sterilized with formaldehyde injections then left to dehydrate for some years. The milky odor eludes description; perhaps it was a bit like that slightly scorched scent dead leaves in autumn might have, mixed with a leaden weight like moss and iron that alerts something very fundamental inside you of your fellow man’s malhealth. As time went on I became quite enraptured with that smell and the way it could conjure all sorts of images. When we were together I amused myself feeling vampiric as I inhaled the emanations of an organism eating itself to death despite the best efforts of modern medicine, which of course seemed to me very apt and prescient and philosophically quixotic for the times we are living, but truth be told the pleasure was a world more basic.

One of my favourite pastimes was parading him around town. I was adept at finding unusually quiet cultural niches peopled by impressionably sensitive types that I could visibly psychologically scar just by existing. The abject horrified revulsion in their faces without fail brought me a grin which was like ichor for my wretched soul so loathe was I to be subjected in my everyday to what I saw as a general mentality of impressionably sensitive creative types. Maybe next time we will think about details, I’m tired