Prison Shell

I'm really good at writing pretty-sounding nonsense in the middle of the night and I'm over tired. So here's a freewrite that just sort of fell out.

Prison Shell (2/16/08)

Tiny drops of Drucudian Lape hang, lingering at gravity’s fingertips. Gravity, the old witch, reaches, stretches her withering hand blindly, like a child reaching for a cookie above on the counter somewhere, much too out of reach. Breeze, blowing strong but futilely, like a desperate whistler whose lips are too dry to make a sound, tickles the drop at the edge, elongating and thinning the fleck of moisture. A miniscule ruby stream, it becomes, and dribbles over the side falling into Gravity’s greedy palm after all.

Drucudian Lape lies on his back, the circumference of his blood increasing by the second. He blinks blearily at the crimson sky, the sky of his degrading vision where blood has found a place to squeeze between lens and ball. It pours down through the pupil holes, which contract in the sunlight, or the sunlight his faulty vision perceives.

Lape is not alone. Life sits by his side, curiously watching the young man hold on so determinedly to the spirit that was never really his. “Drucudian Lape,” says Life, knowing the boy can’t hear anything yet, “you are the shell harboring the chick. It is time to give birth at the minor expense of the shell. Hatch, boy, hatch.”

But Lape doesn’t hatch. He can’t see, can’t hear, not in the sense that doctors would diagnose him as a seeing and hearing individual, but he thinks he can. With this ill-directed belief, he thinks the spirit will remain in him for much longer. No one he knows died before age thirty, so it can’t be his turn yet.

“Where is the spirit, Lape-boy?” asks Life. “What have you done with it? You can’t hold it prisoner forever. There are rules about that.”

The last of Lape’s blood channels out the crack in the back of his skull, but he continues to smile up at the sky, thinking he sees clouds now, but there are no clouds. Not for Drucudian Lape. Cold burrows into his pores like a nest of ticks, causing his skin to rise with bumps. Hollow of ruby sauce, which now sticks to his straw-pale hair, the spirit within him soars through the body, no longer blocked by dams of arteries and floods of blood. But it doesn’t find an exit. Lape smiles because it feels like he has jumping beans in his chest. The spirit careens through him faster and faster, panicked, gasping for fresh light, the light of the outside world. Time to hatch, time to hatch, but the shell is thick and the spirit is weak. Lape’s heart pumps its last, but his brain doesn’t slow down. He thinks it will be a nice day if it ever warms up.

“Prison shell,” Life states calmly. “Less than neutral encasement, indeed. Sent to keep the spirit from the light? You’d better watch it or Death will come back for you, and he will make you live forever, but empty. Empty little shell drilled through the head, sitting on a shelf to be displayed forever more. Come see the immortal prison who holds no keep. Whose warden is his own. It’s what shells want, isn’t it? To be more than just shells? To live a spirit’s life? But sooner or later the farmer comes for all of you. If you will not be a chick, then you will be an omelet.”