EPEOLATRY

ART & ACCOUNT

'An Abyss of Incendies'

by Yash Sinojia

I was thrown into what seemed like an abyss, there my body was freely falling about to encounter and tending to hit a singularity where even those photons of light gets pulverized fine. The air smelled like fumes of napalm in there, vicious and even more pungent. The top of that hole was continuously losing its perimeter as the radius shrunk exponentially. My heart throbbed like a wayward flubber. Unbelievably, after a few moments later that seemed like an entire eternity at that time, I landed. The ground was rough but not a single scratch on me, layed unaware that this unit of flesh and bones won't be of much help any further. I touched the surface: it was hard, arid and carbon black. I scratched a little: some grey powder came off, felt like phosphate.

Suddenly, the earth started quaking and that damp powder was wearing off the walls, smoke ... smoke ... smoke, all over! my stomach started juicing up with bile, I was about to puke. All in a while, the vibration abased, followed by a dead silence such that I could clearly hear my heart pounding but that smoke all around though coughed my lungs, tranquilized my brain which eventually cooled me down and I went asleep.

Startled by an excruciating episode of rheumatic pain in my legs, I got up, what I saw terrified the shit out of me: my legs were metamorphosed into a bull's legs. I felt extremely confined, could hardly stand on it. My ears were red from the heatwave though a breeze fell from the sky, insidiously nausea was taking over.

Erstwhile, I observed a trajectory of a projectile and meanwhile my degrees of freedom were severely doomed, I swung in that restricted motion, forward ... and backward, a little up ... and then down, it was totally involuntary that I had no control over my legs, I couldn't even stop at the median or the peak of that arc, an unstoppable loop: back and forth ... up and down. It felt like I was assigned a task to do within a deadline but I couldn't cut out a single spook of that wheel and break the loop, it was so frustrating and was maddening me. I looked up outside and realized the continuum was at stagnation, only thing visible were just a bunch of milky clouds floating dead like a heap of puffed up cotton.

A nefarious raven popped up from nowhere, through a portal, cawing and fluttering voraciously. He had got iron claws - not trying to attack me or anything, my presence made no difference to him, he just flew over rubbing claws to walls and then there was an orifice of sparks flowing down to oblivion as it generated no fire. Although, the moist air made the place smell of tobacco.

'Why are things like these here? Why are the organic compounds so reactive and the inorganic bunch just so inert? Is this inferno? If it is, why doesn't the place burn? Why ain't I rotting down?' I wasn't thinking about stuff like: why am I here? as that level of brainstorming wasn't going to do any good in this scenario. 'Why doesn't these fluffy clouds pour some rain, drown me and get this whole thing over with?' I was exhausted of all that 'Danse Macabre' and furiously enraged. I raised my hand up high in protest, a lightening bolt stroke!

I woke up in big gasps, drenched in sweat, it was a dream! The duct was racing, it was so cold. I got out of my room, the veranda was dark. Two silhouttes were visible, I approached closer, two men: a cadaverous gauche and a fat nigga, both had earpods on and were lost in a same tune, dancing. The thin fella smiled at me and began shouting 'Humma Humma, Humma! Humma! Humma!' I shoosed 'What the heck? It's 3:30 in the morning', he gave no heed. The nigga stomped in my ears 'Aur udd gai neendey re!' I grunted 'Are you guys high?' I went back inside wearing my shawl 'Oh God! real world is even weirder!' I switched off the fan, took a sip and went back to sleep.