Dweller
Literary fiction. An existence within. Warning: disturbing images and language.
Harsh respiration in the dark broken by a ragged cough as he awoke possessed of no bearing by which to measure the hour. Rank walls of his sanctum bare in stark opposition to that which marred the floor. Pauper’s sleep in which a dream had rendered him within that very domicile. As though even the bounds of his imagination could not spring free from such place. Windowless. Cultured. The scent of rot beyond the sensory with which he is endowed. The bitter frame of a life, honed and cauterized to a singular function within his waking hours.
He emerged from the reeking sheets naked like some pale incubus robed in the artificial gloam of the screen which remained ever vigilant. The only light to break that accursed dark. A chair frayed of its leather, conformed to the shape of him. As though a mold might be rendered. The room choked with mounds of clothing and detritus in the like of his fashion. Pink caps sprouting from the corners. His commune of bastard children. A ring of water embossed into the ceiling like the topography of an extraterrestrial habitat. He imagines tiny figurines lost within.
Food so often evaded him now. Hunger but an annoyance. Thirst assuaged in dreamlike motion. As though the presumptions of biology itself carried little value in such place. He squatted and shat a rancid puddle into a deskside chamber pot carved from a gallon jug and left it there, assumed a paltry assortment of garments, and alighted himself upon the chair. He tapped the mouse and with such summoned his world forth.
Hours of pornography to start the day. He does not touch himself anymore. Pained and bloody ejaculate has robbed him of that sweet relief and yet naught to be done about it. No desire to investigate such symptoms. He watches the performers bounce and perform and licks his lips with the knowledge that he is their patron and scoffs at the sight of male genitalia as though himself performing for some hushed audience stationed at his posterior. He watches and watches. Dulled orbs within his skull lacking any semblance of expression or deliberation. Mouth agape.
The woman calls from upstairs as he pulls open a new site within the screen. Shut the fuck up, he mutters. She repeats her inquiry and he rises, fetid taint crackling like some fractured cocoon of dormancy and he is at the door now. What do you want, he says. Stink of rot emergent from his gums unbeknownst to him. She levies some proletariat task upon him and he scoffs and turns from the door and resumes the computer.
Fingers translucent like the eggs of spiders and hooked with yellowed claws pound their insipid gospel across the keys. An oration of the world conformed to his will. A minimized window yet playing pornography, such now prompted and not of human conditioning. Good. More for him. He imagines himself within the clutched array of artificial bodies. Limbs distorting unnaturally. Faces inhuman in their rendering. He ponders the living faces among which he now sifts like a subterranean predator yearning for worms within the blackened earth. He saves their photos, drooling, giddy.
A quick prompt and his machinations are wrought. A beautiful recreation of the souls frozen within. He spreads such across the site and watches the worms writhe and react. Their pitiful protests. Utter bliss. Better than the prompted sex he’s now closed out of. A ceaseless barrage of page refreshes as his imagery plods across the site like maggots unleashed unto carrion. He bites his tongue and scratches his lower forearm with those long yellow nails and bounces in his seat with the glee of it all.
He jolted awake. Hours stationed at the schism between the upright and unrecollected. Apnea burning in his throat. Acid in the gut. He clicks and surveys the site. They’re not talking about him anymore. One of his brethren has posted new images. He quickly scans such and downloads them and autogenerates memes and begins his next assault. Several messages from his prey. Autogenerate responses and attached pornography. Cows in the paddock now rebelling against the feed he’s provided for them. Hilarious. No deeper meaning. For the lols, he croaked to the vacant din. He fingers his anus and sniffs the finger and cackles. Faggot, he guffaws for all the rage of the world and himself apart.
The woman had not spoken in hours. Or days. He could not recall. He rose from that putrid pile and slithered his way through the channel of filth to the door. Anxiety arrhythmic in his chest. Listening for movement without. Silence. A rattle as though it were raining. Some inner purveyance, that dimmed alignment to natural order, begged of him as he wrenched the door open. The stink of his lair unfolded into the stairwell which he ascended with tendons screaming at the abruptness of their rise and he is on the landing now where the polished wood floor reports the distorted image of himself. A hunched troglodyte with lank hair unfolding across his shoulders. Splayed feet twisted and contorted, the anatomy of his own life drawn and reposed.
Sleet battering the glass block windows, beyond which the pale streetlamps draped cones of light across the vacuum of night. Photos hung along the hallway, arranged with immaculate care. Photo of his father. His sister. All dusted and wiped much in likeness to the wider house. He averted his gaze and crawled about the interior.
She was splayed upon the kitchen floor. Auburn hair with lines of gray. Flies collected within the dried yellow foam at the corners of her gaping jaw. A platter of food rotting at her prostrate hind. He tried to kneel at her side and found that his knees would not obey. Glass phantoms sheered within the gears of his bonework and thus he stood with ambivalent interest. As though he were observing the pornography within his screen. A scan of her breasts and he turned and left her there and retrieved a box of crackers from the cabinet before carefully descending the hallway and closing the door in his wake. Locked as though she might rise in the night.
Days without count. The hollow yearn for sleep unsated. He finds his sister on the platform now subjected to his predatory enterprises. Her smiling face. Sun beyond her shoulder in the image. Litanies to form the story of her life and she prideful of such in her published expressions. He cannot recall the sound of her voice and she has not spoken of him in her writing. The rage at such notion foremost of all. His lip quivers.
He saves the image of her and hesitates. Some paleolithic inclination against the forthcoming action. As though the line of his ancestors were rattling within their choral hereafter against him. He drags the image into the generator and commits his soul.
Time unknown in passing. Stench of a differing sort clawing through the walls of the house. Even he can smell it. The dark spread upon the ceiling enlarged. Amoebic. Often he envisions it moving. Flesh conjoined and symbiotic with the chair beneath him. Clothes rotted away. Clouded pupils. He rises and falls upon the outrage within the frame of the screen and withers within the temple of himself. His own kin speaking of him now. A predator, she says. Alpha, he says. A soul forsaken. Toothless smile in the light and oh how he laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Just gotta bleach my eyeballs real quick. That was awesome.
Wow this so dark. I think the darkest part is that it feels very viscerally real in a future where men could just AI generate women into submission all day with a prompt. Too near future for me but very well written.