anemic. the word rises behind loki’s eyes, clouding the landscape with an even stronger sense of sickness. an image of rolling hills, green grass, and trees stretching to protect miles and miles of unexplored land melts into the squalid sight. taken for granted, shrugged off as invaluable among high rise buildings and a never ending stream of engines humming— loki understands the error of his ways. homesickness is a fleshy mass in the pit of his stomach, eating whatever it can and growing larger with every rain ditch under their tires.
a placid silence falls over the car as loki thinks.
“God is just somebody’s ego.” half of his face crinkles in concentration as he attempts to spit out the sentiment on his tongue. it sticks with every syllable like saliva caked during desperate attempts to be heard. it manifests in a half-mumbled correction, “Everybody’s ego.”
“People make whatever they want out of it,” twist it, tear it apart, and reassemble it into a patchwork simulacrum of what used to be. frankenstein would be jealous of the deft manipulation– words of with intent long lost among men who gnashed fat between their teeth and spat out the rest to rot, “Turn themselves into demigods so they don’t feel so bad about making it up as they go along.”
he can’t see the confessional booth so much as he can smell it. old dust and the thick scent of sweat soaked guilt. forced confessions under the pressure of further accusations, seeping out of bruised throats in small, broken voices who knew what was to come. daily torture in the form of anticipation. sharp shards of sensation like glass against concrete walls of smothered memories.
“Used to be that the pope was the only way to talk to God. You only had to deal with one guy who might be a liar. Maybe that was a better way of doing things.” he takes another turn and plunges them deeper into the starved land. the tumor grows larger, trickling acid strong enough to eat through anything with enough time.
Desolation’s rust-black diffuses into the panoramic blear of the inevitable vegetation, futile against the arbitrary persistence of living; phytophthoric roots metastasizing against a different genus of flesh-root sickness. An eternal argument that would declare no winner, only mutual extinction from the same disease. In between vacant prairies and isolated farmhouses, barren elm trees spike against the faint pulse of inhabitation, atrophied limbs upwards as if crying out its rooted doctrines. Leaning mileage posts marked as weathered gravestones mapping the sepulchral topography, fertile with decomposition. This is a place that made no sense besides its own logic of rot.
Beneath the rib-like canopy of live oak, the car lodges deeper into the live rot like a determining bullet into the aortic road. Silence congeals within the hollow-point space of the car, and the gustative suggestion of metallics hints against the palate, a premonitional lukewarm souring at the edge of his tongue, pinkly muscled from exercised ripostes. Reflexed against instinctual admonishments of those whose god is a crude appendage - a divine flaw as law. Taut with the passively contemptuous expectation of disagreement he won’t soften to reconcile. A generalized disdain that was impersonal, and within the darkening where their physical outlines are dissipating into hues of shadows, allowed Rustin to imagine someone else in Loki’s place. He can almost hear someone else too, a peripheral mumble-shout that sounded confused, demanding to put blood back into his words, as if doctrine was innate as blood is, and he could picture someone else’s arms upwards too, ambivalently hoisted to an uncertain height.
The mundane thump of a castigating gavel never echoes.
Another voice filters through the grey soundscape only he could hear. Half-weighed in its sound at first, trickling blood - pin prick droplets stringing sentences - into each deliberated word as they were spoken. It was Loki’s. The cigarette is snuffed out in a cup holder, its wane glow extinguished with their gleamed shapes, altering the space and amplifying his voice within its newly limited expansion.
Rustin’s silence subsists as he listens, but it’s not a yielding quiet. The tensile swell in him mitigates, and the anticipatory attention distills into contemplation. Loki might as well be talking to himself, and somewhere in between, there it is, the error of that fatal law. The indelible ‘I’ of man, something that shouldn’t be but is. He draws in a breath, the heavy exhalation offering no relief, only the sinuous pull of dread somewhere within him, like a chord being plucked, and the exhaustion insisting in his expression that couldn’t quite be seen now is its echo.
“Man is a self-conscious nothin’. We can only see through what we suppose we are and not within, and if we could, we’d realize there’s nothin’ to know and nothin’ to know that. Won’t be anyone to answer what happens after that either.” there’s a paraesthetic buzz humming in the curl of his fingers on the ledger in his lap. “The only thing that’d echo is insanity.”
His free hand comes to rest against his mouth in a non-committal fist. “People have to reconcile with their own personal gods for a reason. There’s someone to answer at the other end, and at least someone makin’ a gimmick out of hell and hawkin’ heaven is somethin’- even if your savior’s on a stick, because no one can answer to nothin’. Why you think god’s supposed to be shaped like a man?”
“No one’s ever a prophet in their own land.”
