Fate

Fate

Mark Coleman

  I watched the laving against the sea wall through a drunken squint. The Fata Morgana was further heightened by the laziness of my eyes. It seemed that a muslin shift hid all crawling and slithering within it.
  I've had nightmares that left me more at ease than what I saw upon the Mediterranean that night beneath the mad spinning heads of the lighthouses.
  I heard a guzla and looked back. I had no change left for the street musicians who approach you at romantic, candle lit dinners. Between me and the city lights laid a beach fire. Wine drunk, the Greeks danced demented romaikas. The jugs went round and round.
  The flames illuminating their faces. From their heads appeared a confusion of goat horns. Some seemed to pick up flaming coals and throw them about as though they were nothing but poi. An insanity of light twirled and twisted there when only a moment before not even a single man had stood.
  I looked back at the ocean, and compared the two visions. The ophidian orgy raged on. Chopin up to her knees and going out.
  Choking her brilliance in rippling coils. Drowning their crazed Parana selves to make sure that she was dead. The blood surfaced in those plumes that the Coast Guard notices when it strikes them to look down.
  Caught in the pamperos of a meteor shower without an umbrella to protect me; I spun around, and met a whiter than white face tinted blue at the edges. Its eyes like sugary, shimmering lekach pierced me through with hate filled pupils. With a shrill shofar scream it sent me tumbling backwards into the sand.
  I laid there with the convulsions of a caught fish. My tormentor leaned down to better take in what must have seemed to it to be death throes. Those eyes that had been blue balling for such an event reflecting all my inner demons.
  It opened its mouth once again only to find that it had become mute. Lips like silverfish trying to form a word. This word I knew would spell out my demise.
  I had been toying with suicidal thoughts that very night only to chuck them like a bottle into that serpentine tide. Luckily, this strange being was at a loss for the vociferation that wanted so badly to leave it forever.
  Flapping together its stinging lips in bemusement, it seemed to quiver into a blur. The equivalent of scratching one's head when confronted with an impossible-to-solve-riddle.
  It laid itself full length on top of me. It dug with talon-like claws on either side of me. Ever deeper the arroyos became. I felt as though I was being buried alive in some reversed sort of way. I suppose this was all an effort to frighten me with the mortality embodied within the tomb.
  I shook to my very core, and bounced and sprung back against the hoary body in my uncontrollable fit as though this was all an innocent romp with a beauty beneath a canopy that covered even the valance.
  I could perceive a subconscious tic inside of that bobbin brain. A sort of muscle spasm that flexed its way down to the razor sharp teeth arranged in tiers along its yellowing gums. I thought of the women and girls that I had seen earlier. Their diet making it nearly impossible to guess their age.
  Becoming more and more indistinct. More and more equivocal. Perhaps its utterance, while undoubtedly shattering my very inner frame, would have proved salubrious to this fiend.
   I realized that my subjugation was the very thing that it needed. The effect of my submission to its controlling influence would have been immediate. Its contours would have rippled back into place and congealed. If I affected a stillness then all would be over. The word would destroy. Sending shock waves across every corner of the globe.
  It howled so noiselessly that I could hear the breaking of the waves in a seashell a meter away. It held its palms to its astonished face as they slowly dripped and dissolved into the scarlet waters of Lethe.
  Now, it seemed more slave than master. A pursued victim finally entangled in the all encompassing web of gluttonous fate. Anti-epicurean to such a degree that it would devour that aquiline nose, that pufferfish brow, those dwarfish feet.
 The chelicerae feeding distention. Rows of obsidian eyes chewing the soul into tiny morsels better suited for digestion. Eggs bursting open, sending tiffany offspring across the gossamer woof.
  Fighting over the incububotic/sububotic offal. Tearing and shredding bits of anima as the mother looks on in pride. The nearly minuscule monsters acting in accordance to their nature.
  The Furies screaming through the bones from which the flesh was being ripped. The sound of an ill bred bumpkin gnawing at bread and rib.
  Fate is damnation. God hides behind a cloud as the children pray for something other than starvation. For a Christmas in which they are not forgotten like the floating landfills that no one but the birds and fish see. The trash piling up inside of tykes until it grows to such a monumental stature that they end up stabbing someone behind a dumpster.
  Fate is a bitch with the grit of the human race between her teeth. Umbilical cords tangled in her bloated stomach. Her face a blotted mess of tears and disease. She is Pompeii. She is the Inquisition. She is the Holocaust. She is impotency in the face of evil.
  She turns man into skeleton on the battlefields. She gives hopeful parents miscarriages. Deformed and retarded children. She creates psychopaths, religion, jails those never proven guilty. Robs mankind of its innocence.
   Turns empathy into hatred. Sympathy into disdain. Creates homelessness, poverty, depression, hopelessness. Eats the hearts of those filled with kindness then throws charcoal into the gaping chest cavities. Takes the future and moulds it into war and famine. Laughing as it all goes down.
  Fate is a breeding ground so enmeshed in our own world that not even the most skilled mechanic could loosen the bolts that would send it spinning into its proper, fiery element. Gone like a flash in a pan to the Hell where she belongs.