* * *
The sand was a scouring pad, each grain providing its own brief sensation of pain against the flank of his face, slotting into the stubble of his sunken cheeks like a deity’s puzzle. It was uncomfortable, certainly, but he found something nearing satisfaction in lying there, in blending in with the world in such a manner, that any passer-by might not see him, so perfectly aligned was he with the gravel and the dust. His eyes were open, as a refuge from the memories in the shadowy theatre of phosphene. They played on a loop, a repetition of horrors and joys, laughter and tears which viewed like an old, silent film, the ones his grandparents had loved and left their house quiet, even in company, to a fierce, aggressive kind of silence; the kind which rang louder than any tolling bells or screaming venue.
He saw the ocean, mere inches away, a huge percentage of the earth compressing and shifting and weighing down upon itself until it provided the wave which covered his hand, a greedy exercise. From water you came, it spoke to him in a singsong voice, and water you shall be. He thought, again, how wonderful it might be to lay here, to let the water wash him clean and take him into itself, to join the thousands on the ocean floor, silently guarding treasures or derelict ships with all the ferocity they hadn’t possessed amongst the living. He felt a kinship with them, heard them sing out their silence even over the distant thunder of water on water, writhing and spinning against itself in confrontations hundreds of years in the making. What a life it could be to join them, to leave that broken body and mortal coil on the dirty beach he had made his respite upon. To feel the waters rise and boil as the world fell into the sun, and welcome those who followed in his footsteps, who found pleasure in silence and eternal judgement.
The eyes were still staring at him, a shift from torture to curiosity now, perhaps glad to have some distraction from his imprisonment. The mouth is wide open, not screaming, but caught on the first syllable of inquest, of confusion. He couldn’t hold its gaze, couldn’t match the jaundiced flesh in terms of pain; couldn’t hold his own in the face of a veritable eternity of solitude, punctuated by visitation from rodents and cadavers in their tin ships. Is it an end to it that you, too, wish? The question formed some relationship in his mind, as though he couldn’t understand the thing so high above him, but he could, at least, grasp that there was something there to understand.
He longed for a god, for something to rage against and spit at and scream out his hatred. He wanted a cruel laugh, like that of a mocking demon, to emerge from the sands around him, and set him on the path of some long quest, noble in its severity, to burn Hell and save the dead whom linger there. He wanted to argue with something so high above him that was capable of thought, capable of coherency as provided by free will, he wanted to prove that he could earn such things, that eternity was not such a long time, really.
He wanted the bag back. Those things he kept within were his God, those were the things that he used to witness Heaven and Hell, to meld them together in the physical and realise that Purgatory is not this middle-earth, but instead lives in the corners of vision, in the shadows left by the passage of complete darkness. It had been days since that container had hit the water and, yet, he had returned. He wanted the bag back, and then the heat came.
It didn’t hit him, as though some fireball sent from above, but instead swept up his legs, along his hips and his stomach and curled up around his heart. His lungs screamed at him, and he screamed for them as, on shuddering limbs, he crawled forwards. He expected to see the water steam away from him, to boil and twist into a white maelstrom above his head, ascending ever higher as though a smoke signal for charity. Then he was underwater, convulsing in the waves with his eyes tightly shut against the salt and his entire body writhing, scratching at itself, at the sand beneath it and the water around it. His bones were blackening, his muscles burning in the water and his nails were digging into his skin, each movement turning the water red around him.
He thrashed in the water, his back arching violently that he almost feared his spine might break, might splinter apart like affection and leave him a cripple, a parasitic thing dependent on the charity of others. He moved deeper into the water, not by choice, but by the gentle encouragement of the waves and the ferocity of his spasms. He opened his eyes at last, the stinging sensation as nothing compared to the acid he felt in his veins, an unholy fire burning through the tissue of his bloodstream.
The bandage had slipped from his hand, uncoiling itself from his skin like a living thing, one desperate to survive his insanity. He watched it circle upwards, gravitate towards the great expression which stared down at him, the interest shifted to horror. He saw his blood on the white thing, from the digging of his nails into his palm to the ugly marks where his knuckles had connected with the mirror. He reached up for it, the burning failing as his interest shifted. If only he could reclaim that thing, if only it could be restored to his flesh then all the pain would go; it would be a salve on his very soul. He dreamed of his mother, when his fingertips knocked the edge of the cloth, of the sweet medicine she gave him to calm away the night fevers and the waking fears. He saw his father, when the bandage slipped upwards, sitting in his armchair with a grey face and limp hands. He remembered his wife, when the cloth mocked him in spinning, beautiful circles beneath a yellow moon, and the sound of bottles smashing against the wall.
As he began to sink, his vision dimming around the light, he remembered his grandparents, their faces twisted into a rictus of laughter, and dreamed of the silence.