The Measurements of Decay

by K.K. Edin

Follow me now, dark-hearted and gray-souled, as I stride on into the mist. If all ends are sown into their beginnings, then there is no other storm but this one.

Madame Hugo had become insufferable. She had started with the peeking in at breakfast, and then moved on to skipping romps of faux-concern down the hallway at mid-day, speaking with trumpets in her throat and stumbling by my door with the grace of an elephant. In case it was not already clear, let me pronounce it: I loathed her. The violence I conjured up for her in that dark sanctum of mine was infinite, and the subject of her various fatalities and tortures came to almost—almost, but not quite—rival those intrusions which such thoughts of Sophia continued to make.

But, of course, I had no proof for any of these enticing thoughts. Cursed proof! Cursed proof. Proof: flimsy, false, ethereal fugitive, hiding at the end of a regress that runs out the world itself. No need for proof.

It had begun not long after he had learned that she had no procrustus. Tikan, who hardly knew Sielle or her history, and whose sleeves were ever streaked with his heart’s blood, had started taking her as a blank canvas on which to project his own idea of her. And this idea was, insidiously, an abstraction he made out of her. To him, she was becoming the living symbol of his cause. Despite her flesh and her mind and words—rather, due to these—he began seeing her as a mere ideal of humanity, a fleshless world-soul containing in her the essences of each living person. A spirited, thinking person in a world dispirited and mindless. The torch-bearer and the posterity. The reason, the final cause. In her he saw some image of survival in the ideal unity of freedom. And in some sense, as the moment lingered, it was as if he were aiming his gaze through her, beyond her, and not quite at her.

There were, at times, ceilings so high as to match the apartment tower where they had retrieved the briefcase; and though derelict, there were also monuments carved of gold, onyx, silver, and gemstone, sitting desolate in the darkness they had been erected to defy. The monuments often resembled no definite figures, but figurative celebrations of the cosmos, now corrupt in the shadow. Invented constellations; hands upholding star systems, now

looking more like a symbol of entropy.

Where they had acquired these objects in their happy captivity, she could not tell. Though their expressions were, for the most part, still mute, she could yet discern a difference in their fixed stares, most obvious in the children. It was a subtle crease under the eyes, the mouths only slightly hanging agape. One of the children, whose gaze flickered more attentively than the others, was even holding a palm-sized, blackened rectangle of stiff paper, which retained a faded red mark at its corner and jagged gold at its top. Sielle could not restrain a smile from spreading across her face, for in each of those talismans over which they loomed, mystified, there remained the forms of metamorphosis and history and decay, and perhaps man was therefore an inescapably metaphysical animal yet.