We Are Here to Hurt Each Other

by Paula D. Ashe

There’s another face beneath your face. You’ll see it, peeking out from behind the face you were born with, only revealing itself in the half light. It is what you looked like Before, when you were Unstructured. When you, when I, when all of us, were aspects of emptiness. Thing is, if you stand in front of a mirror in complete darkness, the other face is fully visible. In fact whenever there is complete darkness, you can feel the soft shift of features, can feel the shadows unfurl from beneath your skin. Your synapses relax because the void wants only reunion.

I found the Rotting Man sprawled on a concrete platform underneath Clarksdale Bridge. He was sleeping on a flattened cardboard box, surrounded by empty forty ounce bottles and cigarette butts. I could hear his snores before I made it all the way up the embankment. His living reaffirms my faith. He is porous, his skin dotted with lesions that serve as peepholes into his grotesque anatomy. He is a grammar of putrid colors. When he moves, the grey-green clumps of exposed muscle wriggle and throb like malformed worms burrowing deeper into the rank caverns of his body. Blessed be the Rotting Man.

I saw her life as a strand of rounded bits of scar tissue. Degradation after degradation, stretched out taut on a thin silver wire. Eventually, my sisters and I could transform her wounds into nacreous halos;

The real challenge is living inside the Grand Illusion of Order. Recognizing the universe as it is—a cosmic slaughterhouse unending—is difficult as the machinations of reality function only to deceive sentient beings into believing there is some meaning behind the echoing chaos.

Above us, the white light from dead stars spun capriciously through black fields of desolation. As they did before my birth; as they will do once I am dust. Pain is the source of all matter. It is the force that holds the universe together, that will tear it apart, only to rebuild again. Throughout the ages, humanity asks over and over again “why are we here?” and then pretends as if the Void does not bellow the answer back every single time. We are here to hurt each other. Again, and again, and again, in perpetuity.

Some nights she will sing in a language that blackens her lips, teeth, and tongue. The blisters will heal with time. Never interrupt the song. Never interrupt the voice that responds inside your own head, unless you wish to look into God’s bloody eyes while dangling from His meathook.

A knife is to a body as a ship is to the sea. A small woman before, but now that the work is near, she is a giantess. How does a vessel choose its path? So many possible routes, suggestions in the stars, half-remembered superstitions, promises in the wind, and above, a waning, half-lit moon. Crisscross the ocean with that upright ironclad, set loose her estuary of secrets. God’s eye closing.

at sun’s fall a spark of liminal alchemy ignites the blighted city. Even the ditch-diggers feel it. A change, a turn, a transformation. The brutish depravities of the day are lulled to a decadent limerence. In daylight, cut knuckles and bruised bones are evidence of wounding. In candlelight, every injury is an invitation.