Mimir

Mimir

"Man marks the Earth with ruin." -Lord Byron

I am wheeled into an open room and abandoned to my own devices every morning. Left to listen to the false promises outside the window while the orderly either plays poker in the employee break room with the rest of the sadists that work here, or rapes one of the gibbering patients in the delusional wards. It's better than listening to him blather on about his sexual appetites though. So, usually, I count myself lucky that I'm left to stare here at the window and knowing I'll never be able to feel the wind on my face or the grass in my toes. Not today however, today I have a guest. This will be the second time I've seen it.

I remember the first time I saw it, I thought it an angel, it was obscenely beautiful, pale and lithe, at the time I'd assumed it was female. I was mistaken, mind you, it's no angel and it's not a woman as far as I can tell. Besides, angels have wings.

It'd been standing in the room with me, it's translucent skin full of light and love and geometry. Just standing there in the corner near the huge open window overlooking the decaying garden outside. I was in awe, but if I'd had the ability to move, I'd have run to the window and leaped the moment it began to speak.

"You couldn't help yourself, could you?" It spoke to me, it's voice like a thousand dying birds. Malice dripped from its maw like vomit. It paused there for a moment, tiny quakes rippling over its skin.

The thing moved so suddenly, launching itself toward me, its rage warping the room around it as it moved.

"You were told not to look!" It screamed at me, it's gaping mouth ever so close to my face, but I couldn't do so much as flinch away, catatonic is what they said. I knew deep down that death was close.

I believed without a doubt that this creature of power and grace would kill me, pull my soul from my body and devour it while I bled out, but as I tried to prepare myself for the killing blow it slowly backed away and the room faded away with him. They were still there, but I couldn't see them or hear my surroundings, not even the buzz of silence. There was only darkness and void, the thing had taken away my last senses.

Now, despite my lack of hearing I could still feel it speak. "You opened the window and looked out after being warned not to, all because you wanted answers to the questions you couldn't be patient enough to wait for." Its voice made me feel as if I was a child being torn apart from the inside, and even though I was not moving, I felt a shiver reach up into my brain.

My sight slowly gained its freedom from its prison, returned the thing to visibility again. The serenity in it's face calmed my heart and made me at peace, but it's eyes told me tales of such sadness I was overwhelmed and started to cry, tears flowing from my eyes and onto my lap. The experience was maddening.

It was true of course, I did look when I was told not to.

See, I work with glass for a living, I was one of the best in my field, windows, fancy ornate etching, you name it. I even worked on complex dielectric mirrors.

"You saw things that made your bowels turn on end. So now you're here in this asylum spending your days drooling on yourself. Look at you, sitting alone in a sick room with shit in your pants and vomit on your shirt." There was, the thing was no liar. The orderlies leave us to wallow in our own misery, until they throw us in the showers at night and hose us off with cold water.

"So, I'll tell you your answers, but then you are going to have to pay the price." I couldn't reply, frozen as I was. I didn't want to know.

No. say no you old fool, can't it tell? I wanted to run, to flee.

"All you have to do is tell me how it felt, tell me how painful it was to feel your mind slip away." The thing turned it's eyes on me, eyes filled with suicide. "Not right now of course, right now you will just listen and be quiet."

It moved a little closer to me, setting it's chair in front of mine.

"Your world," It said, "and everything in it is shit." The creature flicked it's hand as the venom in its last word curled in the air around us, lingering like the plague. "This world you were born into, naked and crying, This once beautiful world you lived in, loved in, toiled, fucked and struggled in, and will probably die isolated from, the planets and all the stars and galaxies in the universe, is all just excrement, flung off of creation." I felt as if I were being inspected, the way it looked at me.

"You know it is don't you? That kind of knowledge, it's primal, it's in your blood from birth. You knew it before you looked. You knew it before you even laid eyes on the In Between for the first time."

Whatever it was, it took my hand in its own, gently, almost lovingly, as it spoke. “You remember when your parents used to tell you all those grand tales when you were young?”

I honestly hadn't thought about my parents in some time, but their reintroduction to my memory was painful. “It was your mother that used to read stories from the bible to make you sleep at night.”

I resigned to myself that I would hear this thing out, though my mind continued to yell at me to run. It was the memories that bothered me the most.

It took its eyes from me to the window “So many tales over the years,” it said almost to quiet to hear.

“The story of creation,” It's voice suddenly bright. “That was a popular one in its day, but now you've sacrificed it on the alter of science, creative little monkeys.” That smile again, “Coming up with the Big Bang, now that was a particularly brilliant thing to come up with. You have no idea.”

At this, the creature leveled its cracked lips to my forehead and immediately my flesh felt immolated. my skin crawled away from its lips as life, which had lain dormant in my heart and my mind, raced through my body. My Guest gripped my hand tightly and hauled me to my feet. I tried to say something, a thank you perhaps, but more likely a cry of terror. Before I could, my throat seized as I opened my mouth. “You will need your legs,” it said, “But you will remain silent.”

It lead me to the window urging me to look out. I hesitated of course, my eyes clenched shut. I had no idea what was going to happen to me if I did, the last window I'd looked out of sent me here to Bedlam. My curiosity won the day however. I stepped up to the sill, I could feel its hand on my shoulder, assuring me that I'd be fine, and in that moment of distraction I opened my eyes and felt the world slip out from under me.

The next time I opened my eyes, I saw in whole what I had only glimpsed before, but The Angel did not follow.

I saw all of it, I saw the earth in the sky, and heaven and hell and the in between