Combustible
Prose
It’s happening, again. A shattering silence erupts all around, puncturing your bloated placidity.
The hunt is on, and you’re the quivering quarry by habit. Your skin turns a pale and velvety white, a soft and tender rabbit.
On all fours, breathless and bruised, burrowing a hole, your own little piece of abyss. Vision blurred with the lust for escape, sweaty palms creased with tortuous roads and futile prayers, a hideously human landscape.
Pulse like machine gun fire, miniature explosions in the minefield of the chest. Desperate gasps, gurgling in gasoline, exhaling fumes acidic with anxiety.
The battlefield of memory, putrid with carcasses of defeats, the soil soaked in hot ignominy. Eyelids crusty with diabolical doubt, starving for an epiphany.
A raucous orgy of naked phobias in the harem of the mind, a poisonous mating call to fornicate with failure. There’s a sweet seduction in submission, a twisted courage in capitulation.
Look, now, bloody perforations in your pristine white rabbit skin, the predatory gaze of humanity slithers in. A white-hot conflagration in the entrails, you let out an icy sigh. Yes, you know, the end is nigh.
You step forward with a beatific smile, prepared for your glorious self-immolation. Step back, you tell them, any moment now, rodent ready for detonation.
You’re front and center now, the incandescent spotlight melting holes in the back of your neck. It’s time for your blindingly brilliant feat, flaming missiles of bones and guts and brains and rabbit skin, the shrapnel of defeat.
I’m fine, I’m fine, it’s no big deal, arms of concern around your little rabbit shoulders. Saccharine injected fast-food pity, regurgitated displays of piety.
You scream and scream again, a human tinderbox, your voice vacuous and inaudible
Please, please, step back right now —
Don’t you know I’m combustible?
