❝ formaldehyde ❞ woobin/chanshik
This was it; his life had developed into a pathetic re-creation of Stand By Me. Friendship obsolete, palpitations fictitious, and his bronchi absorbs the stench of chemical preservation. It is morning coffee – rejuvenating. The undertaker had glazed the corpse in a veil of cosmetics, cheeks pigmented in dyes of the Acca sellowiana’s filaments, and to further the mockery is the perfumes those feminine phantasms had concealed mortality with. In death, the man is christened as Ester, methyl benzoate. The appendages, disjointed from his palms, duplicate the curve of the casket’s ridge, living flesh perpendicular to that which decays, himself, and the solemn audience. Their subconscious personalities are reveling in mirth, and yet, when donning a smile, he is disparaged as the primitive intruder within their citadel of bereavement. He exhales, overcome by pompous wintergreen.
"Are you mentally deficient? You can’t smoke in here.”
Contortion, his face is a moor of enmity, tongue connected to the roof of his mouth, and his skeleton is an assembly of fragments sealed together by torrents of gold freckled lacquer resin. “Old man…” Chanshik’s lungs are machinery, steam powered technology producing whispered hisses, the embers smoldering underneath adipose tissue. Fingernail indents misappropriates the purity of the heavenly material, a blanket of redemption bestowed to the Earth’s personification of sinful indulgence – humanity. Rats are a more respectable species. Rodents die of starvation and dehydration because of their bonds, interwoven tails snaring them in a social grave, and mummified rat kings have been discovered since the Middle Ages. But I’m not smoking right now… His thoughts are a resonance and the facilitator to memory. The mental syllables burry into his reminiscence, rousing Mnemsyne and her muses, and they coax his past with a Greek dactylic hexameter malformed by cerebrospinal fluid poetry. He cannot translate her hymns, but sups with her heedlessly.
“Reach forth, child of the Golgotha...
...decapitate with your kintsugi anatomy.”
"...Strangle him, strangle him, strangle him...”
Oh Naberius, why must even the valiant distort his voice to mollycoddle his non compos mentis enactment? In spite of the savior his joints rotate in anticipation of defilement of the corpse – or did the desire belong to that raucous crooning? His physique is a mausoleum of gypsum, esophagus a mere aperture, and he doesn’t know of oxygen. Chanshik bends his fingers inflicted by erratic tremors, and his knuckles collide with those of a hollow statue, one final, casual farewell. Asphyxiate? Why would he act on such an absurd notion? The details return, and his commemorations are deformed cyclopoid offspring crawling through the miasma, each cannibalistic, devouring one another. They had met once, when the heart of the senior circulated plasma, hardly so, as during his hours of working as an active therapeutae of Asclepius he had met the damned soul, his veins swathed in Hellbore glory.
They had jested of maladroit bounty hunters with nicotine lingering upon their lips, and a brusque voice chastised they whose profession was servitude to thousands as salvation, the hands that defy God. Rewinding, a single pace backwards reintroduced distance, his arms meager pendulous weight at his sides, comatose, and his pulmonary alveolus expanded, his blood cells invigorated. Presently, the majority of the mourners had vacated the wake; they exited in droves to entertain themselves with sumptuous wines and persuasive fabrications of ascension. Chanshik’s pupils, the cavities authentic proof of mankind’s absence of spiritual aura, fixated themselves on the ornamented crucifixion of Christ, abandoned as well. The time allotted for questions had expired, and he would never know the legitimacy of the near-stranger’s dogma. “Waste of my time…” Caustic, he damns the spirit in an acrimonious calando, wishing Abrahamic mythology would incapacitate reality for the seer sake of his perpetual torment.
