INVITE JOY TO ENTER YOU.
There's a town in your mind and you can see it clearly. It has a general store seemingly cobbled from lumberyard scraps that sells old clocks and porcelain dolls alongside cooking essentials. A candle shop fills its surrounding street with sweet scents of every nature and preference. A cafe nearby has had the same reliable menu since the day it opened, although the owner is constantly being replaced with a new one. There are homes there, many of them increasingly empty, all slowly cradling into one another, and a few new condos spattered about as realty companies remotely envision glitzy ghost towns of the near tomorrow. Taken as a whole, the town feels displaced from another era, perfectly suited for the lost to find themselves. The people there are happy.
I am reading a flyer I found stapled upside down onto a telephone pole near my small duplex. I don't think it's a very well-thought-out piece of marketing. Just a large chunk of blocky text, only further stressing its pointlessness by it being displayed the wrong way. Nevertheless, I find myself drawn to this flyer. Maybe it has worked effectively on me after all. I remove myself from the meaning of the words for a moment as I observe the piece of paper itself. Frayed and water-damaged corners. Faded blue Arial font. Peeling lamination. No name nor business attached. I'd believe you if you told me it's been there for ten years.
The headline of the flyer sounded like the charged words of a thousand carnival barkers or perhaps a crusty televangelist intent on collecting waterfalls of private jet funds. Yet, there's a reason those types of folks reappear throughout time. They lie in a way that feels playful. They lie in a way that sings like a sugar rush.
Who doesn't want some joy after all? I'm not unfamiliar with the desire. Try living with a dying mother and see if you can remember that emotion. For most of our lives, parents revert us mentally into being a child again, just by entering the room. That is, until you become a caretaker. The person who helped funnel all the mythic elements of your personality and memories into becoming who you are is morphing into a mumbling, needy infant. A somber decay that reveals more bones with every passing day.
As much as I want to show her daily that I still love her deeply, it is exhausting to care for my mother. Suddenly, I am the provider of life, yet all I can do is sustain her pain. It has made me fear my own passing all the more. I decide to read the flyer.
The population of this hamlet (4,895) never changes. As one person disappears, another person arrives in just enough time that no one has ever considered to update the census.
Deep in a junkyard thicket that is closer to this town than one would imagine, lies the bones of a stranger no one alive knows the name of. This stranger wasn't very well known in the past either, but at least there was a time where he had a name. Now he goes by what the locals call him when he's caught, however infrequently, in the eyes of the living: Bloodbrewer.
When spoken of outside of this town, Bloodbrewer's name was often said with a catch in the throat, when it was able to be said at all. Although primarily cobbled of bones, he was many other things too. He was dripping, tenuous strands of body meat, still odorous as if just deceased. This meat hung freely from bones in obtuse pockets of his frame like a wicked, haphazard clothesline and it sloshed back and forth grotesquely with every step. Another one of Bloodbrewer's physical traits: the ripped remains of one eyeball, gutted by a raven's beak. It was just intact enough to make out the shredded outline of a pupil, a tiny eclipse of sparkling color in an otherwise muted and inhuman figure. There was no eyelid, so this damaged appendage rattled and fluttered about with wild abandon.
The skeleton man wore a coat of gnats. This coat almost covered him whole and feasted off of his meat-flesh that never stopped regenerating long enough to make a difference to his appearance. The coat shifted and rippled constantly and, when unfortunate people approached, the swarm got particularly feisty and fraught with malice.
I keep discovering the day's events and rotating them in my mind like puzzle pieces until I find a way to make them click together. I vomit after all, although I manage to mostly land it on the bed sheets that surround me.
Do you know that feeling where you begin to drive somewhere far away, fall into daydreams, and suddenly you're there? You try and wrap your brain around the fact that you've somehow driven yourself over a great distance without recollecting a second of it and it scares you a bit that you could have done such a complex and demanding task without any thought. This is the feeling I have as I read this flyer, which I have removed from the telephone pole. I find myself reading that particular section of it over and over again, without thinking once of advancing to the next section. It's an odd, creepy story about a skeleton man that somehow makes me feel something...nice.
I read again it out of the corner of my eye as I prepare my coffee, feed the cat, and then buy plane tickets to a town whose name I do not not know. I read the flyer once more as I leave the house, locking the door behind me, and even shaking the handle a few times to make sure that it is really, truly locked. The TSA process is quick after I have walked fifteen miles to the airport, because I have brought nothing with me. All that time, I was reading the same few paragraphs.
On the flight itself, I get a stomachache and want to pass out. I realize I haven't said goodbye to my wife. My darling Megan, love of my life for nine years. I didn't even really say goodbye to my cat, other than refilling his food dish.
The most devastatingly disturbing realization whimpers towards me. Mom. Mom is dying and I am not there. She needs to eat and she never eats lunch unless I'm there to eat beside her. Mom needs to take her pills. She needs her Depend changed. Megan won't be home until late that evening and Mom doesn't listen to her like she listens to me.
I anxiously read the same section of the flyer out of the corner of my eye, and this is shockingly helpful in distracting me. The more I stare at its almond brown color, the more I find myself making excuses for my actions. I forgot to bring my phone, so how could I bother even trying to contact Megan? The cat would be fine too. It was only a cat, and this was only a short trip. I deserve this. I need a break. I need to get away and experience more of the world. Maybe I would find true joy.
I force myself to think again of my mother. Instead of the cheerful, vibrant woman who raised me, I imagine her as she as now: a gaunt, deflating balloon tipped on the edge of ceasing to be. I try to look into her eyes, but she avoids mine and screams in agony.
"It's over! It's over!"
I now fear her and her words. In fact, I hate her. I need peace from the intense discomfort she has placed in me and staring out the window isn't helping.
In fact, what will help me most of all at this given moment would be to read the next section of the flyer.
The people of this town thought the Bloodbrewer was a perfectly fine resident, even though they always knew when the Bloodbrewer was about to kill them.
You would wake up and begin your day like any other day, but upon making your bed you might notice a dead gnat right on top of your pillow, right where you were just sleeping. A small morsel to unsettle you and make you check your hair frantically.
There would be another one though. Perhaps, it might be in your bathroom mirror, or stuck onto the ceiling right above where you prepare your morning tea. It might be on the doorknob, or even in the pocket of your favorite pair of pants. But you'll find it, and you'll find many more, at first slowly, and then with the alarming speed that panic injects into your perception of time.
You might think there is a way to escape this fate, but no one has done so thus far.
What a funny story! I laugh softly to myself. It's not unlike the feeling I get sometimes when something devastating and shocking happens. You know the worst response in the world is to laugh, yet you do it anyhow and you hate yourself for it. Nothing about this story is silly and yet it is the funniest thing I have ever read.
I guess if you really think about it, maybe the story on the flyer is funny because there are some vague similarities to my own life. I don't remember how I got in this room, which is actually the funniest thing of all. It's a cozy sort of room though. The walls are made of this charming earthy wood and the room contains a bed, which I realize now that I'm laying down on, and it has some old paintings from the 1930s that I don't really like, except maybe I do kind of like them? I'm realizing now that they're the sort of paintings that kind of grow on you. I must have forgotten to shower, because something smells bad. I must have forgotten to eat, because I'm really hungry. I must be pretty lonely, because there's no one else here except for me.
I take that loneliness thought back. There's a gnat. I don't really know if that counts as somebody, but it makes me feel seen. It's sitting there on top of the flyer, which rests on my boarding pass-the only thing I can remember owning except the clothes on my back. I kind of feel like the gnat looking at me, which I also find very funny because I can't see its microscopic face and it very well might be dead.
Even funnier, I now am realizing that there's a second gnat! It's by the shuttered window, which frames a town that I feel like I can almost name because it's so familiar to me. I can remember things about it that happened even before I was born.
I can remember a time when this town was growing quite a bit instead of being stagnant. People wanted to live here, for it was such a lovely place to be. It was perfectly placed between the natural resources of both river and forest, and the soil was rich with life-giving rain. I remember pies, church bells, and well-worn books.
I remember when a stranger came to town. He was feared and then adored. I think he's still here.
Well, now this is like a game of hide-and-seek. Another gnat looking at me from the tip of my left foot's big toe. This time, however, I am afraid. All of this isn't...right. I don't know why. But it isn't right. Oh god. I feel sick again. My brain hurts. My brain hurts.
The window opens, and a bone comes clattering in. I thought this window had a screen, or perhaps it was even boarded up entirely. The bone falls inward despite these limitations.
The time between the bone falling and my ability to move is lasting an eon: a painful, clammy rush of a century passing by, all while the clock refuses to travel, my brain experiencing every millimeter of the descent even as my heart still is hoping to beat at least one more time. Finally, as the rest of my body is catching up, I stand. I am immobile, in woozy waiting for the theatrics to continue. I muster up enough eye mechanics to read the final morsel of the flyer:
What happens next can only be experienced by the lucky few who read these words. For the first time in your life, you will invite true joy to enter you and you will fear no longer.
More bones follow, as are many gnats. Live ones this time. They now fly about the room with distinctive ambition and focus. They are flying inside of me as I scream-or at least attempt to scream-and they layer my innards with buzzing, with crawling, with biting. My skin is a turning tide, soon rippling with the outlines of its invaders, a bloody writhing jet to displeasure all my body. The bones, previously in a jumbled floor pile, are slowly forming into a figure, and that figure is turning his one gelatinous parody of an eyeball to me as he takes a first wavering step. Meat is drooling from these bones, a grisly new shampoo for the carpet.
The figure is approaching me with no emotion to counteract all of the emotion spilling out of my mouth. Trapped fruitlessly in my own eyes. The gnats are suddenly reorganizing to the skeleton in order to form his infamous coat. I remember the coat now. How could I have forgotten it? Most of its components were inside of me, and are now shooting out however they please through holes in my body that I didn't even realize I have. As they roar out of my eye sockets, the only image I have left is the one my mind conjures up of my abandoned mother, rotting forlornly on an untidy bedspread, being devoured by timid gnats herself. I see Megan sobbing over her, aged into an old woman herself.
That was the most painful moment of my life thus far, only followed by what is happening now as the skeleton man flows slowly towards me in jagged shutters, and then suddenly climbs inside of me-a reversal of a snake shedding-tunneling right through my open mouth, the tears on my face following inward right along with him. As he quickly makes home, the inside of my throat is eviscerated, his jagged bones halting my anguished bellows and tearing a gushing xylophone in reverse. He is violently tumbling my insides like a concrete mixer.
My mind now completely blanks and a musty memory floats itself to me, almost like a vintage Polaroid photograph found sticking out of a chipped piano bench in an antiques store. I see the many residents of this town, and I am asking them all the same question: how did they come to be here? They all dart around the question with dexterity, smiles intact. Did it really matter? They continue to smile with a serene inner peace that I find infectious. No, no it does not matter. I don't think anything really matter here, and it is beautiful.
The Bloodbrewer's abilities allow all who live near him to feel this way, like a predator that sedates its prey before consuming it whole. I can almost feel all the investigators and curious travelers he had invaded who have given up on their short trips in order to suddenly live by this junkyard village. Even the ones who have managed to survive here the longest kept moving their lives closer and closer to the junkyard, the epicenter of this exodus in search of true joy.
The skeleton man may have gleefully removed that ubiquitous sense of peace in his long and tragic introduction through the window, but he mercifully turned the good feelings back on again when he slipped inside of me. I am now experiencing the purest brain hemorrhages of orgasmic pleasure ever experienced by humanity. It is pure rapture, color, and bliss beyond any connection to prior experiences, or to any reality that a living human has ever experienced. My second birth.
I am consumed in gratitude to Bloodbrewer for allowing this to happen to me.
A gnat writhes joyfully atop a flyer. This gnat knows that The Bloodbrewer remembers not what it means to author his own feelings, and he regularly grows bored in his singularity. The old skeleton man is a leech of feeling, for his ability to create emotions from within died along with the long-rotted remains of his brain. He resorts to incredible means to obtain that privilege again. With his wicked methods, he is able to experience two of the fullest, most ironic emotions of the human experience at their highest capacities. Almost all emotions fall somewhere in between a scale of fear and joy.
As night falls, Bloodbrewer slithers out of the scrim of a deceased body and returns to his junkyard, hidden in assemblage as decrepit and broken as him. He clatters into a silent pile. The sun wishes him good slumber as he dreams up an old paragraph in a new town.
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Joe Kowalski has previously been published in bioStories. His film career has allowed him to work with the likes of Henry Winkler (Barry), Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), and Mara Wilson (Matilda). His short film adaptation of I Am the Doorway was given the blessing of Stephen King. Joe lives in Cleveland, and he can be found online @PogieJoe.
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