Excoriate

A canvas of scars across flesh, under the watchful eye of mocking sea-birds. Words written unseen in excoriated skin.

The pain flowed like a river, or the coursing of molten slag from atop a black mountain. A volcano’s fiery innards caressed across my skin in a way that would have, otherwise, been sensual. Perhaps it was sensual, for the pain was my own, and only mine. There was a violent intimacy between myself and the inflictor.

The unseen inflictor.

Each morning, the pain had cemented into scars; that slag cooled and hardened into remnants of the night’s agony. Shapeless, at first, other than tracing the hideous flow of the torment. Only in the mirror could I inspect the artwork for which I was the canvas; a delicate line of flaking crust beginning at my left bicep, drifting across the entirety of my arm as a winding rivulet, and eddying into a greater, forking stream at my chest.

The morning sensation was discomfort incarnate. As the pain-lines extended, the scar tissue would sometimes break and weep, especially as those lines flowed down into my palm. On days where the memory of the night’s work flared and hummed the most, I did not attend work. How could I?

“You are doing this to yourself.” The physician was terse, and cold. He had no right to be so cold to me. “Perhaps unconsciously.” I noted the deeper implication here: that I might be a work-shy, slicing myself each night in order to avoid the heavy work of the docks during the day. But this was not so. The work might be laborious, and the scents of the salt and sweat and fish-guts barely tolerable, but I had not done this myself. I could not. “I will prescribe you medication for sleeping, but this will be limited. You will need to work.” This last part was objectionable in its opprobrium. Of course I would work – if I could!

The medication did not stop the bleed of the invisible knife, save that my awareness of it occurring during the night was transformed. Before I had been only vaguely aware of an eddying current of flaring sharpness, but now I felt – in dream-like terror – more acutely present. I dreamt that I was affixed to the bow of a ship – a maritime Jesus, perhaps – and the sea-birds engulfed me in their frenzied shapes. The sea-birds were silent and mocking, and their bills were daggers, and their efforts slow and careful and precise as they excoriated my flesh. The dreams would progress: the sea-birds became rotten and putrid even as they worked diligently at their task, and eventually so too did the ship become the same, crumbling around me into a horror of guts and fetid fish-scales. No, I was not Jesus. I was Prometheus.

I stopped the medication – I would not be prescribed more, in any event - but the dreams recurred, and progressed in their insidious delights. The silence of the birds did not persist totally: sometimes their voices would become those of whispering children, mewing and whimpering, even as their blades haunted their way across my skin.

It was several weeks until the scars took on another form.

“Forgive” the scrawl upon my flesh-canvas screamed at me, in the mirror. It was haphazard, yes, as though the writing of a child, but it was there. The grime of the mirror could not obscure it for me.

The physician would not see me again. I had none to show the word to; the dockworkers would not stop in their work to acknowledge me, let alone inspect the traces upon my skin. I considered bringing this directly to the dockmaster, but I was afraid.

The word remained mine, and mine alone.

Each night I became subsumed by that rotting ship. As the dream would end, everything would disappear into nothing – even the sea-birds – save for the hot metal affixing me to…something. It was not the ship itself holding me, but something else that I could not see, for I could not turn.

Forgive.

What was I to forgive? All those who had slighted me – ignored me? Those who had put me in this vile position? Perhaps, but who specifically?

My gambit was clear: I would avoid sleep entirely. The logic was sound, as the desiccation would only occur at night, as would the dreams. If I could forfeit sleep entirely then I would, but as this would not be feasible, instead I would sleep in the comfort of the daylight, and remain awake and inviolable when the sun was at rest. I concocted an injury: laden with goods, I walked directly into the path of another worker, and rolled off the dock. The pain was immediate and crunching, but it was a normal pain: not this wandering curse of it.

The physician remained taciturn as he inspected me. The other workers – even the man who had been my unwilling and unknowing accomplice – had already moved away, without any shred of concern. “It is broken. You will, it seems, need rest. I will speak to the dockmaster. Your pay will of course be affected.”

Pay? What of pay? My successful stratagem would be sufficient consideration.

“Sir – see here, my scarring. It has grown worse.”

At first, the gentleman doctor was disinterested and his callousness unabated, but those eyes widened with some other feeling as he did, indeed, inspect my flesh. He quickly glanced askance and did not meet my eyes. “You had best rest.” I spied that as he moved away from me, and ordered two men to guide me to my quarters, he made a gesture toward God. What a strange and cold practitioner indeed.

My quarters were spartan and similarly cold, with the now-frigid sea-air not held at bay by thin walls and porous windows, but those windows allowed in light. I felt that light would heal me, because it was so opposite to the merciless cruelty of the night. Yes, I would bathe in it, and sleep.

The dream took on a new quality as I slept in that light.

A quality I did not want.

The sea-birds did not slice me. Instead, they congregated far away, though their shadows under the eerie light were impossibly tall and stretched almost to my trapped form. Even at this distance I could see that they were transformed: their feathers were mostly plucked, and instead human-like skin was exposed for all to see. Some wore dark hair. One was draped in clothing. Strange clothing…like that of a child.

Forgive me.

I did not wait for the ship to break apart and collapse into putrescent ruin. I jolted myself awake – perhaps made easier by the presence of the afternoon light. Yes, I would avoid the pain and the scarring in such a way.

I began to scream. A knife, hot and unseen, began to trace across my inner thigh. As it reached my crotch, the pain heightened. The pain was so much deeper, and my mind screamed just as loud as my voice. Surely someone would hear me through the paltry window?

I hastily removed my clothes, still screaming. I found the mirror, though I collapsed several times before I could. My clothes were wet and red, and the entirety of my skin crept with an awareness of something other. I was being violated while awake.

I had not escaped it.

The mirror showed me. That word was appended to. Excruciatingly. The pain was immense, and my consciousness wavered.

Forgive him God.

How could this be?

Why this writing? What did it mean? Could it mean me?

I drifted in and out of consciousness: it seemed to be hours at a time in each world, though perhaps it was only seconds. It was dizzying. The gulls screamed at me in an omnipresent thunder of fury. “NO.” They screamed louder. “NO. NO. WE DO NOT.”

Then some of them began to laugh. Such a childish lilt. Demonic. Mocking.

“NO.”

The weeping slices transformed away from words, and arranged themselves into a solid line, from my sternum up toward my neck. I cried, and my tears mixed and mottled with the red. I felt I was watching myself be vivisected.

My heart vibrated as the line ended at my gullet.

Please, no. I whispered only to myself, for it was my pain alone. Not that. I had been spared that.

The line began to trace the shape of a noose.

The slice was deeper now, and furious. Blood spilled freely.

Not the gallows. I had been spared the gallows. They had not found their bodies – so what was there to forgive me for? None could have known what I had done to them. Justice had been meted, accordingly, if the lawmen had no case!

The pain seemed to subside, but I knew that this was because so much had been spilled. I could barely see now, but I heard myself splashing around in wet. I found myself hovering between both worlds.

“Forgive him, God.” The child-like sea-birds called in unison. “Forgive him, God, for we cannot.”