I've Been Falling Asleep to Voices

(A work in progress)

I've been falling asleep to voices. Before the still and quiet comes, before that time of hazy present, I can hear them crawling and chittering in the walls, their secrets slithering through my linens and into my bloodstream. I can feel them filling every pore and then wasting away through my skin, disapparating slowly. 

I can feel them climbing up the veins and arteries - expanding or thinning out where necessary - before finding their way up top where they take to circling around the folds of my gray matter. There, they navigate the memorials of so many dead moments, maneuver around the nearly dead ones, and take stock of those that will die eventually. 

Smoke dreams. I smoke the dreams. The letters of their phrasing meld into the wisp, melt, drip down into my crevices. "Ride the abyssal black of Alecto; paint the sinners in Megaeran red; dessicate it all with Tisiphone's rot and poison." The smoke becomes a part of me the way the voices do, melding into the follicles, the synapses, the covalent bonds of every atom. 

You can hear the thoughts buried in the wall, scraping their nails through miles of insulation, electrical wire, decades of paint on top of paint on top of paint. Can't you hear them? Can't you hear the hardscrabble behind the pictures above the sofa, above the fireplace? Can't you you see all the arms and hands trying to push through from beyond, stretching the surface that won't allow fingers to break or tear through? The fists slam against the spongy wall, try to pull it apart, hoping to pull a screaming face through to the other side. 

How deep will the walls bend before bursting wide open to the sound of thunder ripping the air apart for miles as limb after limb comes spilling forth looking for another body to cling to?

The voices curl up around me, make a nest of me, incubate me. I am embryonic in the dreaming's womb. Above me swirl symphonies of disembodied voices lilting and undulating, a crescendoing sympathy of what's to come. The air in here is mournful chorus, tastes of black and ruin. It is charred and oversaturated in a thing that eats its way around me as I pass through the space. 

They never yell, the voices. They lure. they seduce. They never lie, but they never really tell the truth. They are the product of an eternity of forked tongues and crossed swords, loose lips and crossed hearts. 

*

If I allow myself the moment, I think I can hear the distant screams of the dying through the plaster of my walls. How many bodies do you think have been buried in secrecy, hidden from the eyes of god? How many lives have been snuffed out, never to sing another prayer again? 

How many dreams have been drowned in the dark?

*

I've been falling asleep to these voices and they become more substantial as I begin falling in my sleep. I can feel the dream wind around my body as I plummet. There is an odd stillness in the moment, like a breath-length moment of zen until the choking comes. I feel myself getting lighter, but only because I know at my core that my organs are drying out, crumbling, falling to dust inside me. I can feel the elasticity of my being begin to wither along the now cavernous skin walls. The dusting spreads, removing the layers of muscle tissue easily, painlessly. Each bone surrounded and wrapped around and crumbled from the outside. 

No more wind. No more plummet. The breath-length moment expands up and out and I am back to being embryonic in the dreaming's womb. I have forgotten how to explore an hour without it seeming never-ending. 

(3,978)