To Travel

Bodies in bodies.

Bodies of bodies.

True knowledge requires self destruction. I’d always preached it, but I’d never practiced it. Never, until this morning, when the red wire slipped into the black module and I moved while going nowhere. My consciousness – my essence – erupted from my body and left me standing in that busy room of machines and batteries and magic.

(Magic is nothing without machines and batteries.)

I left my body without looking back. The air was smoky and shimmering. The walls were porous. No sound met my earless nothingness. There was only sight. My third eye; my soul; my angel: my guide. My everything.

I traversed the room and slipped through the wall.

I hung over a city street of hideousness and chaos. To see the universe as it truly is, as hideousness and chaos, was to experience great validation. Goodness and order are fleeting aberrations. Chaos overpowers, seething and miasmatic.

A gaping grin gashed the sky above. Through it, shapes poured.

To travel is to understand shapes that would be invisible and incomprehensible when shackled within a body. Shapes of countless dimensions. Shapes of colors so far beyond natural spectra that they registered as flavors on the tongue I’d left behind. Shapes are the devils of our nature.

I floated down to street level. The ground was translucent and fragile. Shapes twisted and writhed through foundational pores, paying no mind to the matter I once believed to be solid. I followed one, a pinched, non-Euclidian phantasm of impossible proportions, into my home.

Inside, my wife sat reading her book. She saw nothing of me. She saw nothing of the shape. A smile of contentment rested on her face as she studied the words on the pages before her. The shape probed her.

She shifted in her chair, as if suddenly uncomfortable. The probing ceased. The shape left her. In its place were three, infinitesimal spots on her right ovary. I traveled forward, into her. The spots began a slow, inexorable metastasis.

Chaos overpowers.

I left her and the room and returned to the street. Shapes swirled in and out of buildings and homes and people. I rose up, over it all, until the city sprawled beneath me like a mirage. The pores of the universe contracted and drooled and gaped as the world I knew continued around it all with contented obliviousness.

The area near the hospital was packed with ghostly, indescribable things. I traveled toward it and watched as the shapes poured in and out, down and through, up and around. Shapes merged the free-floating bacteria with healthy workers and visitors. Bacterial bodies in human bodies. I passed through the walls and gazed upon the shapes connecting the dead and dying to the newborn and preborn. Newborn bodies of dead bodies.

Bodies in bodies.

Bodies of bodies.

I felt myself being drawn back through the walls and toward my home. I tried to move on my own, but was unable. I passed through the homes of countless people as they went about their lives, entirely oblivious to the forces around them.

I slipped back into my skull and opened my eyes. Everything was as I’d left it. The batteries of my machine no longer contained a charge. I walked downstairs and my wife greeted me with a smile of honest affection. I stared, blankly, at her abdomen, and wept.

Bodies in bodies.

Bodies of bodies.

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6 Replies to “To Travel”

  1. Am I stupid? I don’t understand

    1. Skyeraid A Rothwell says:

      I think the guy used a machine to see a world overlaying our world, and the reason he is crying is because he saw a being of power give his wife cancer. He knows she will now die and it is all because of some creature he cannot fight.

      1. Oh. I thought she was pregnant and he knows he’s not the father. I thought he could see life in forms of shapes because it said bodies in bodies. My bad..

        1. Metastasis is the spreading of cancer from ots’ point of origin to other parts of the body. The shape gave her ovarian cancer that would spread to the rest of her body.

  2. Mell Xavier says:

    I did not understand.

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