A/N: WARNING! The writing style of this oneshot is VERY heavily based on the book The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and especially the first chapter August [1]. As a result, the characterization is incredibly skewed, i.e. OOC (I never liked writing in 1st POV anyway), may be taxing to read, and will of course be very angst-y. Bruno's style is absolutely beautiful, and though I tried, I know I've barely grazed the surface of his complex, ingenious, and imaginative imagery. Still, I hope whoever stumbles upon this reads it with an open mind and enjoys. I sure enjoyed writing it. [1/31/13, final.]
The Streets of South Park
Year
[1]
In that year of ninth grade, Death went to find his true calling in space and left me, with my friends Kyle and Stan, a victim to the horrific world that would soon consume our lives as adults and later on into a void of forever. High on the polluted air of South Park - the aroma of mixed tobacco products and oily virgins splattered on the side of some second-rate drugstore - I slipped into the dreamy stupor of listless anticipation, hood emblazoned with kissed oranges and the scent of saccharine sex, a melting vat of sunbeams.
Standing heel-deep in snow, Stan stared out across a buried civilization of ant mounds, like blooms of crimson emerging from the coastal tides of Florida—the slippery foam floating upwards to poison breath and sea alike, alive with bodies drenched gray in sleep; waters whose depths rose shackles to harvest human souls within deceased compartments. Alongside his motionless energy stood another boy, he in debauched apricot jiggling with impatient legs, his violence concealed by eyes of sanity feigned, and the belief of a god too wasted on heaven's narcotics to give a damn about him and his prayers—those complaints of a morning already gone to waste, filling the sky a mournful puff of drug-less smoke.
The familiar houses stood to stare back at our stares, each struggling to out-compete the un-dead risen through boredom and a lumbering Monday morning: the trees that peeked through the dense over-growths of stupid human lives were indicative of a town too far along its path of destruction to notice anything amiss; the black and yellow sign was faded to the faint sound of wind as buses rushed past four or five times, none familiar to us three as we held back our words and waited through a blizzard of hidden emotions.
After he finished his antsy survey, I knew as usual that Stan would lift his eyes to punish my attention with his starkness, gaze indigo sea. All else would fade away into warmth as he glanced upon me, lights strung bright in a mind blank from mindless mortality (of which had once came again and again), as if the existence of reality - the whiff of a home bathed in shadows and screams - had disappeared into Hell and the brilliance of my friend was resonated through me to soften this body hardened from painful death.
During those moments, I would lower my own placid blues to stare lasers, embarrassed, at my shoes. From some unknown, heat rose upward and filled the gaps of emptiness that made up my entirety; I'd embrace the red flaring across my cheeks—resent it, and accept it. The rats, friends I had acquired during those hell-fire journeys to Death's hearth, perched before me with their tails half raised in accusation, as if they were tired of my spinelessness as well. I knew every one of them twitched to crawl through my lifeless bones, sinewy drips of mortar made to support the house of my body. The most excitable ones were alive in glee, visible only to me, and they squeaked soundless noise loud enough to pierce my walls of stoicism (to which they scurried back and forth in a mussed adaption of the tarantella)—they forced my gaze up again, eyebrows furrowed in annoyance.
But I shouldn't have looked; what a mistake.
Sapphire eyes sincere and alive met mine, troubled by my expression, like a perfect storm. They asked a simple question, one rare few ever dared to question me anymore; but there would be no answer for them, however bright or earnest they glowed in hurt. As snow crunched silently under leather-bound boots to approach this diseased body, I quickly spoke up to interrupt Stan before he could dissect my feelings and offer it as a token of courtship to his bastard Kyle. Although I was aware of his penchant for helping others - especially me - out, the dramatic irony of his unspoken inquiry would drive me insane with hatred for that damned Jew—and I had no desire to become like Cartman. The monotone houses, festering fanged grins, taunted me with their lightning flashes of perverse imagery: the brief glimpses of an occupied bed through a frosty windowpane, two bodies entwined within each other's flat surfaces and hardened, upright baggages, and this thought - this picture - filled me with a rush of desire so overwhelming that I almost stumbled backwards in fear. It was this, only this, that I could never ever explain to him. Now the eyes responded to my automatic words (muffled to announce my insignificance in this hellhole of a society); their sky-blue openness narrowed to resemble a cloudy, darkened corridor.
"Okay then, Kenny... I guess it's none of my business anyway."
His voice was hurt; I'll be hurt too.
A flicker of something defensive shot forth from the covert, green-hatted teenager's expression, standing close beside Stan his movement urged notions of ferocious lust, as if to pry loose his friend's very essence and drape it as fine robes over that athletic frame wrought in porous lies. Apart from the two, I stood as my steps unconsciously backfired. Those orbs of envious emerald seized hold of my soul, as one would expect, he being so acutely aware of me as a threat now, and the jitterbugging of bored, violent dispassion shifted into attention, already reminiscent of the Black Plague.
Thus Stan and I diverged uncomfortably along separate edges of the sidewalk, snow interspersed between his firm footsteps and my pitiful ones. Beneath the cauldron of milky clear skies frothed a winter-land of snowflakes; soon I could make out the quiet murmurs of conversation sparking life into this otherwise zombie silence—the camaraderie of Stan and Kyle's voices like some distant ghost of Cartman taunting in my ear, reminding me of how poor I was, how invisible I had become, how unloved I would continue to be, how many times they could replace me with a careless sneer and another lonely, friendless boy willing to be their supplicant.
Eventually the bitterness of revelation poured forth to consume my lungs, dispelling choked air muffled in cloth as a plead for help. Losing Cartman to the savagery of middle school, all of that childish insecurity, the barbaric transition into high school and the disjointed fragments of our relationship with one another, had been surprisingly painful; but it, as all such things in my life, had passed on as brutally swift as everything else. Like the moon transversing the night sky on broken wings, the gradual passage of time grew to shatter something, change everything, deep within me.
And no one had noticed.
The houses still continued to grin with their dentition of sex-covered mattresses, each crease and crinkle of sheets spreading tides of crimson onto the ground and underneath the surfaces of trampled floors. Overlooked by my once-companion Death, who'd suddenly taken the role of an air-borne astronaut, I stood as quietly as I'd always done, beside the one person I'd always cared for, as a weed basking in the radiance of the more able-bodied, courageous sunflower. I could have slipped away into passive reverie once more, mind clouded with illicit, unforgivable thoughts and a hood chalk full of Vitamin D, my nose suffocated by the stench of a sin-riddled town contracting in and out to birth even more poor, diseased-ridden fucks like me. But I didn't.
In that year of ninth grade, with the snow like a molten vat of icicles buried below the soles of my feet, I smiled instead. Transparent to them both with helplessness, I listened as time raced across galaxies on a rage-filled mission to strangle Death to an untimely death, indifferent to my tragedy.
[Fin]