Inside the Beast

With my usual hopeful dread, I enter the monster. I need food.

You know the place. Its color is piss-yellow. It’s maw sits at the rear of a filthy and broken face; a black tarry stew. It smells of Hell.

No shade in sight; waves rise from its surface and my heel digs in to the softening black, crawling with scurrying creatures and their armor; smears and swipes of greasy, sticky handprints; I think of gravy. I sense that in seeing, hearing, I will smell, taste, as well. I avert my eyes. Too late to miss side and rear portals nearly opaque with films of goo, small eyes peering through muck, the days spoils piled high and haphazardly. Too late to un-breathe ravenous, unwashed desperation, predation, hate.

I loathe this place, this hive of angry, hungry beings and their swarming, unrestrained offspring. I want to run. I fight the bile in my throat and put one foot before the other. Go through the motions. No one sees my aversion. I do not visibly recoil, but walk like a ghost; invisible and in another sphere. I have a purpose and I have come this far; I am within the Beast now. The need I come with beats at me and spurs me through my fear; I have emerged from the other end of the Beast before.

 

Quickly, quickly, take what you need before the swallowing comes. Do not look behind, ignore all but your mission, keep moving, lest the Beast taste you and the end without end takes you for good.

 

Panic, terror, paralyzing nausea threaten to lose my way for me. Sweating, tamping down my own instinct for escape, I name my exit to calm myself. Calculating its distance, the obstacles between. Willing my legs forward through the Beasts innards, I try to breathe silently, without inhaling, without admitting the sickening-sweet soup that pokes into my nose, my mouth. Intuitively, I know this is its essence, it’s power. Once accepting of it, desensitized, all hope of escape is lost. I imagine a bubble, shielding me from the etching it wants on me. Foul and fermented, I whisper a Fuck Off to it in my mind and then pretend it wasn’t me. Moving gray, like a ghost again, invisible. Quickly, quickly, but not so quickly as will call attention.

I drag my burden behind me, these things I need, can’t live without any longer. No one drags, but pushes, for design dictates the ease of this. Yet I feel safer with a barrier behind me and it keeps me from looking back. What I might find following makes me shudder, and it’s forward I need to go.

Sustenance is what I drag in this burden. Another reprieve from emptiness, from being here, from becoming one with the moving train of the Beasts guts; flushed and then eaten again and again and again. I know I can pass through unnoticed if I become small enough. Processed without absorption, no nutrients extracted, un-tasted. Like a stray husk virtually unchanged; blackberry seeds manage to pass out of birds this way. I must manage it once more.

 

My feet make a squish-squish sound as I approach the last test. The place they look at the things you take, tell you what to give them. Some kind of syrup, half dried and mingled with filth, trails ahead of me. A woman shaped like a sofa walks directly through it; squish-squish, squish-squish; sucking noises as she lifts her feet. I think of tentacles and the terror rises in me again. Squish-squish, suck-suck.

She sneezes into her hand and I watch, riveted as she strings snot from her fingers to her face, from her fingers to the handle of the cart she pushes. I will myself to look away, but am gripped by the trail she continues to print on everything she touches now; each item she unloads from her takings, every surface she encounters, all before me and now I can’t escape the slime, pushed along by the mass behind me. Pushing along like some giant excrement I am now a part of, forced to blend with the rest of this digested mass taken in by the gaping maw of the piss-yellow thing, the Beast.

Please, please, let me pass through, I’ll never come again ohgodletmepass.

A mouth bleats at me in sounds I don’t understand, and I step forward. Squish-squish-suck. Hands touching and shoving all I will need for sustenance, tentacles. Taking what I give in exchange, brushing my own hand with a shocked look at my temperature. I jerk away.

Quickly, quickly, please. Ohgodplease.

 

Shaking, I bundle my things. The woman shaped like a sofa lifts a face to me, sweet as cotton candy, and moves her mouth. Slowly her words reach me in a forgotten language and I know she is saying “These are the times I remember why I hate to come here. It’s just so much work.” She is struggling to put endless shapes into paper bags, alone. A belt pushes and crams the shapes towards her tighter and tighter while she tries to keep up. Her expression never changes. Placid, pleasant, like her pace. She does not hurry, but thinks she does.

Her mouth moves again “My husband is at home with the kids. Thank God.”

Not knowing how to respond to her sounds, I make a laughing noise and try to become gray, a ghost. She will never remember me.

 

With another thrust, I am expelled onto the black and tarry face again, blinding with it’s heat and fumes, deafening with motion and jabbering. Shrieking, cursing, a dozen languages I can no longer tell from my own. A woman slaps her child, pinioned in a cart by a strap and for a moment, silence is the loudest thing. Then once more the squish-squish-suck-suck, squish-squish-suck-suck and for the first time I spin my head around to see who or what follows. I am almost to safety, my shell, shiny and hard and fast.

Squish-squish. Squish. I know the sound is coming from myself now and I look down, not behind, and I see it. Strings of half digested matter flay about the soles of my boots, already growing with hitchhikers picked up across the tarry face. Pink, gritty chewing gum, hot and melty, pebbled with cellulose filters. Shiny things, a feather with droppings. Ooze, oil, perhaps dog hair; something matted and tangled. Things I can’t name.

I scream, not knowing my own voice, silent so long. The strings on my feet are growing, flopping up and over onto my ankles. I stare in horror, knowing that this is how it finds you, gets into your shell, comes home with you, makes you it’s own. It’s probably too late to do anything, but I am fueled now by my own terror and disgust. I try to kill it by stamping my feet wildly, scraping and jumping away in a weird, frenzied dance. Someone honks and speeds by inches from me, laughing. It has almost made it to my knees and I am seized now with anguish, frantic to get it off of me. I imagine once it leaves my boots and finds a fabric to attach to, it will be with me always. In a feat of balance I pry off one boot, then the other, knowing a miracle has kept the stuff from getting onto my fingers. I keep seeing tentacles. I throw them as hard as I’m able. Shivering, I am hot and cold at once.

Standing shoeless, I open the door and throw myself rear first into my shell, all but my feet still wearing socks. Cranking the engine, I peel socks away from me and jerk my feet inside in one motion, lock the doors, and back out in a fit of smoking tires. No time now to worry about who’s watching. No time for what I came for. I haul ass to the road where I can disappear, just one in another kind of mass.

Inches from merging, I glance in the rearview mirror and see the boots laying twisted on the tarry place I threw them, already run over, already some of their goo on someone elses shell. I look away, only to have my eye jerked back to some movement. Staring, I think I don’t see what I see, and I hear the suck-suck sound in my head again. Pleaseohgodletmepass inching my way forward and I look once more and one of them is closer now, squish-squishing and my tires make sounds too. My boot twitches and makes a little hop and ohgodgetmeoutofhere I step on the gas and take out some guys front bumper on my way and he gets sideways in the next lane and I’m real sorry but I don’t care cause I’ve got to go now and then I’m free and there’s so many of us I look just like everybody else.

 

Now you know why I hate that place. I’m never going back.