electricsadness_part6
We wandered down a long hallway. Forms came out of the wall. I tried to ignore it, but the air was thick with screams. Long, drawn out, hideous screams. I knew it wasn’t a dream. How I knew this was...well, I’m not sure. It seemed as though, maybe, the bathroom was as much illusion as the train, and the blood not from a real injury. I felt my face. There was no blood.
I sniffed. It smelled like burning wood.
“This is where all the stuff of the world makes the other stuff of the world. The burning you’re hearing is regular burning. It’s both...real, and unreal. You might be wondering if you’re dreaming right now.”
“Yeah...” I said, scratching the back of my head, looking around. All around us were walls which faintly smoked, walls woven out of organic material. They shimmered, like many fishes. From deep inside the walls, along with the screaming, was the crackling of many fires. I reconsidered my opinions on hell, among other things.
“Have we died?” I asked dimly.
She looked at me, staring, almost staring through me. She stood still for a very long time, then she nodded. “Yes,” She said with certainty, looking around with a strange gaze. “Yes,” she said, suddenly distant.
I gave up and looked around. I don’t know how, but...what was she focusing on? Off in the distance, that terrible noise. Screaming through the halls, but screaming as though a machine would scream, getting closer...faintly I remembered that noise on the beach. Was that...could it have followed us here?
“Get down!” She yelled, pushing me down to the ground, which to my disgust, was squirming. And then, we started slipping in. As if we were being tossed in a strange pot, we wove different concentric patterns through the soup. It was closer to me, closer to touching the inside of me, than anything i had been in contact with before. It felt just as though it was part of me, disgust fading to dark solemn union. We wove these uncertain patterns, through the muck which wasn’t, through the passageways that weren’t, just simple, solid space. Something mechanical wove through us, many--robotic?--creatures which seemed as varied as though dreamed up by an overactive toddler, this is where it felt like a dream, it really did, I both wanted to wake up and wanted not to wake up and neither wish was granted.
“Is this limbo?” I said, but my words came out as odd bubbles. This was obviously a place to relax, so I did so, and as I leaned back, flipping and flopping as though this place had a necessity to turn you about and about, as though there were currents, or rather tracks on which we rode, for they seemed to repeat. Endlessly. Limbo or purgatory, it surely was.
I watched as Tina opened her mouth wide, and blew. She pointed to the bubble she made, which was bigger than both of us, and motioned to it. She swam right in.
I shrugged and followed her. Upon entering we immediately fell onto a hard floor. Not gracefully. Slowly we both sat up.
“We might need to talk,” she said, gently angry it seemed. “About what you think you are, and what you think I am...”
“And?” I asked softly.
She looked oddly cross, folding her arms, sitting with her legs crossed, I noticed. “Why you seem to be inside of me.”
“Inside? I...look, if it’s about the giblets..”
She shook her head roughly. “None of that matters.”
“What does?”
She paused, looking off reflectively. “Genesis.”