I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

Beauty seeks its level, as does ugliness. As do pariahs.

First there was light, and then there was no-light. First there was heat, and then there was no-heat. And — First there was love, and then there was no-love. But in its place did not come the absence of love, the emptiness that the going of light and heat had left. Another moved in to take its place. In its place came hate.

The form of the habit she had become still drove him to one side of the bed. Despite his need for room to throw out arms, legs in a figure-4, crosswise angled body, he still slept on only one side of the big double bed. The force of memory of her body there, lying huddled on the inside, together cuddled body-into-body, a pair of question marks, whatever arrangement it might have been from night to night—still, her there.

Genesis refers to sin that coucheth at the door, or croucheth at the door, and so this was no new thing, but old, so very old, as old as the senseless acts that had given it birth, and the madness that was causing it to mature, and the guilty sorrow—the lonelyache—that would inevitably cause it to devour itself and all within its sight.

How I wish I could forget Those happy yesteryears, That have left A rosary of tears.

Empty winds howled down out of the tundras of his soul. This was the charnel house of his finest fantasies. The burial ground of his forever. The garbage dump, the slain meat, the putrefying reality of his dreams and his Heaven.

They might have settled on a pathetic sense of loss, had their sensibilities run that deep, but none of them would have felt that the expression said, with great finality: a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams.