Heart
I left. I loved her, and helplessness tore at me. I felt the weight of destiny and fate creeping into my thoughts by the murmuring wind grazing my face beneath the round sun. And I was walking home, grinding my thoughts for explanations when I noticed something in the leaves scattered beneath the bushes by the sidewalk. Something had caught my eye. I was the curious type when walking alone…“take my thoughts away,” I asked. I crouched over to look, and as I focused my eyes, I noticed red liquid spotting the dirt and leaves a little further inward.
I let my eyes wander about the redness, the splattered pattern that told me I might be looking at blood. Had I seen animals mangled and mushy in the road before? Yes, so I wasn’t quite shocked; that is, until I spotted the round lump that carried all of the characteristics of a human heart. The arteries had been severed and the glossiness told of the recency by which this life-pumping organ had been crudely extracted. My eyes fixated upon the object and my own heart began to pump rapidly. My stomach grew queasy and I straightened my back aghast, and I turned to look around to see if anyone had been watching. All was barren along that stretch of industrial warehouse wasteland, though I did notice, much to my sudden concern, an individual far off by a building, an individual who was looking in my direction.
I began to quietly move along, but I was too late. I glanced back to see what had evolved, and I quickened my pace when I saw that the figure had begun to follow me.
The Figure
I sensed the danger and I walked faster, yet the figure copied my movement. Now my heart was pulsating with nervousness, and I took an alleyway to try and throw off the direction of my pursuer. Sunlight shot at strange angles, and intervals of black shade contrasted the views of white with black, the hot temperature dank with discomfort. Dark shaded spots were cooler, and within it a nook where the buildings began to condense, I hid, praying I would not be discovered. I could feel my breath, and I did my best to conceal the noise, to try and relax.
And then I saw it, the figure that stalked me, edging through the visual plane, invading my point of view from around the corner. It walked slowly, and I say “it,” because it was no human like I had ever seen. The eyes were large black holes beneath a wide-brimmed hat, and two large nostrils sat enmeshed in a pall of what could have been rotting flesh, for parts could have been dripping while others were fixed with bruised, blue and burgundy tatters of raw flesh. No lips could I see, and instead the craggy teeth brown with disgust occupied the vacant space where such lips could have been, if such a creature could have even known lips. My eyes shut by the piercing look of two, laser red eyeballs. It’s jaw moved oddly about, the bones making a crunching sound, and it’s head faced me dead on. I was discovered.
Heartless
The figure stood mechanically, its mouth dripping with ooze as it stared at me, and I grew painfully nervous…I thought my fluids were about to burst in my pants. Our eyes fell into a gaze as though it were hypnotizing me, and yet in my peripheral thoughts, I sensed something dramatic about the fact I was not being attacked. The coat it wore was disheveled and dirty, and was not buttoned up so that I was able to see the rotted flesh emanating from underneath.
As though the being could read my thoughts, it began to move in towards me. The red eyes. Those diamond red eyes began to hurt mine, piercing into my soul, and my stomach grew queasy with the inability to move, and yet I was shaking so violently that I wanted to run, but I could not. I was frozen with fear. It came close enough that the foul odor emitting made me want to vomit. Then I saw the bloodied and gaping hole where a heart was supposed to be, and I realized this was where the bloodied heart I discovered in the bushes had once belonged. A heart torn, severed from the nurturing womb leaving behind a loveless corpse to haunt the souls of those who never find love.
ESSENTIAL 