dream of hatching

Despite all that I have done to seal my dreams off from your influence, I still see you night after night in the most shameful and most precious of my dreams.

In it I am twelve years old once again, crouched over your body in the backyard of our childhood home as I try my level best to find a way to kill you where you will stay dead.

Finding myself engaged this futile task once more, I recognize that I am dreaming and I open up your ribs to find the part of you that comes from beyond this world, that makes all this yours, that would have been mine if only our parents had decided to head back to mom's place instead of dad's on the night of my conception.

In reality, if there even is such a thing then it is wholly intangible to a worthless, rotting creature like myself, but in the dream it shines inside of you, round and bright like the moon or a dragon's pearl.

I gently pry it free from your chest, lift it to my mouth and swallow it whole. Make it mine.

A warm, tingling sensation spreads throughout my body and suddenly even the shadows that I live among are brighter and more beautiful than anything that I've ever seen before.

It's like when I take your blood but the blossoming of my senses continues past the limits normally imposed by inadequacy of my frail human mind and rotting human body. I am no longer frail, nor rotting, nor inadequate. Nor human, I suspect, but I've never understood why you so badly wanted to be.

As my consciousness extends beyond my body, it brushes up against yours and I can see each and every part of you, no matter how hidden.

It's not much to look at now that I've relieved you of that which you'd come to consider such a burden, but you have been the center of my world for so long that there's still nobody else I'd want the chance to know so deeply.

I yearn to dissolve the boundary between us slowly, to better savor your last moments as an existence separate from my own, but I do not. Instead, I gently close the wound in your chest, smile at you and say, "Don't worry little brother, I'll take it from here."

Then I hollow you out before you can comprehend my betrayal.

This is perhaps the last act of kindness that any among that collection of rotting creatures known as humanity will ever know and it is a selfish one. I simply do not want you to have the chance to hate me for what I am about to do.

Sometimes I make the body that is no longer yours wrap its arms around me and I reach down and tousle its hair pretending that it is still you, embracing me out of gratitude for freeing you of the destiny that you had so dreaded.

Once I am ready to proceed, I unfurl the tendrils of my metaphysical body from the conduit of my shell, like hungry strands of fungal mycelium, like raging floodwaters, like unquenchable flames.

Unlike you I am not gentle. Unlike you I show no restraint. Unlike you I digest, I drown, I burn. I take because this world exists to be taken, rather than left to rot.

For a moment I see through countless billions of eyes not just those of humans but of every rotting creature that crawls on the earth, or swims in the sea, or takes flight in the air. They are reduced to nothing more than inert matter as I tighten the tendrils of my metaphysical body around the planet to much the same effect as my human fingers would have tightening around an overripe fruit.

It feels so amazing that I cannot resist continuing to lash out at everything within reach. Each new act of destruction is a pleasure only surpassed by the next as I grind planets to dust, burst stars like fireworks, lay waste to galaxies.

Like a phoenix on its pyre, like a bird in its egg, like a butterfly in its cocoon I craft that which I have destroyed into a new and beautiful body with which I will emerge to face the world beyond.

However, before I can do this the dream frays apart and I wake up.

After this dream my rotting shell of body has inevitably made itself even more disgusting than usual so I shower to cleanse it of its sweat and the other, baser fluid that it secreted as I slept. As I go about this task, I struggle to come to terms with having realized anew that I am nothing more than an empty rotting husk of a creature, born only to die.

I try to be grateful for the mercy of your restraint, your gentleness.

For every happy moment that I was able to experience because you did not fulfill your purpose upon realizing it.

For all the glories that still await me, as fleeting and futile as they are doomed to be, in this life that you want let me live until my body gives out from its constant struggle against entropy and I can live no longer.

On your life, I swear that I try.