Sensophrenia by Christina N. Ayers

After staring at the sun for only an hour, the center of his pupils started to grow, to eat away his eyes. Liquid eyeball dripped down his face, hot and sticky.

I don’t have to see anymore, he thought.

With no eyes to accompany his deaf ears and mute voice, his journey was complete.

"Now I can concentrate." he mouthed silently. Fumbling his way to the desk, he found his pen. Everything came flooding out onto the page, just as he knew it would. Bracing the slender pen over the page, darting back and forth, his face erupted in a gleeful smile. Between the gaps in his teeth there was only the dim empty cave of his tongueless mouth.

His forgot his world of pain.

The writing on the page, small and perfect, dipped slightly in a diagonal slant across the unlined paper. For hours, he sat at his desk with the feverish pen pouring out a steady stream. Even when his hands began to tremble with exhaustion and he grew parched with thirst, he did not budge from his chair. When he felt the blinding sun of noon pressing against his face like an iron, he rose.

He made his way to the bathroom, walking until his shin made contact with the edge of the tub. He aimed at the drain and urinated. I need to get some air, he thought, as the strong smell of piss wafted toward him.

Feeling his way to the sink, he rinsed his hands, then scooped up several palms of tepid water to ease his screaming throat. He straightened and faced the mirror and ran a hand across it. His smile returned. It is such a fucking chore, he thought, but at least I don’t have to see it anymore.

He had to escape the empty rooms of the tiny, airless house. All the windows were painted shut and covered in black spray paint. All except the window in his office, the secret place where he did special things. Already, every sensation of touch had become exquisitely intense. The texture of the grass tickled against his ankles. The eye-melting sun slapped against his skin like warm oil.

Outside, the ends of his fingers sang as they contacted prickling bark. Hands cramped with writing, but already reading the universe in a kind of braille. His skin absorbed every stimulation. The wind floated through his pore. The tempo of his heart began to increase with his awareness of its rhythm, and his skin throbbed in unison with it.

It is too much, said his tortured mind.

Collapsing, he leaned against the grooves of the tree trunk. Days passed and still he sat there. Unnoticed, a spider crawled into his left eye socket, leaving a webby clump. A silvery stream of drool dangled from the corner of his mouth.

Herman tried to grasp his way out of catatonia, shaking his head vigorously to rid it of cobwebs. Weak with hunger and dehydration, Herman doubted his ability to rise. Damning the absence of his paper and pen, idea after idea swept through the tired circuitry of his brain. Cracked and dry, his soundless lips worked incessantly. The hands that rested on his lap were bloody and raw, anything to dull the sensations. Behind him the oak stood like a sentinel, painted with blood.

It is useless. How can I be a pure vessel when I am preoccupied by my own distractions, he thought.

Herman drifted once more toward oblivion, toward the shadowy places where his mind still wandered. He was writing a story in there, a story for the world. No darkness or tragedy took hold there, none of his own amplified sensations. Instead there were perfectly formed women with flawless skin and brown eyes that never looked directly into the sun.

Somewhere, closer to the surface, the characters in his head have clearly defined, melodious voices. They speak in tender phrases, such as: "I love you too." "Spring is near." "Come over here and kiss me." Muddling up and down in the swampy depths of his head, he can almost hear the nearly forgotten tones of his own voice again. It speaks to him with one familiar sentence.

"It is too much."

Foggy and unraveled, the web slips down his cheek, a dry, cotton-candy tear. Weeping cotton, soft and clingy as Velcro against his stubbled face.

I’ll have to try again. Perhaps this way.

The chain dangling from the lowest tree branch chafes his wounded hands. Rust flakes off as he grabs on. His feet work against the trunk of the tree spastically as he pulls his weakened body up with all the power left in his atrophied limbs. An eternity ticks by, measured by the burning breaths he takes as he climbs. Then for a brief moment, at the highest branch that will support his meager weight, he feels the empty space behind his body. Suspended for only a millisecond, a champion diver against a backdrop of brilliant sky, he lets go.

Everything in that moment of release is unseen, unheard, and unfelt by Herman; the sound of his spine as it snaps, the sight of the painfully blue sky, the terrified bird that brushes inches above the top of his head. There is only a cloudy sense of pure thought descending upon Herman’s crumpled body. Finally, no distractions, not even the redundant ramblings of his own mind. The narrator within his skull is free to tell someone else’s story now.

Still, there is something nagging at the back of his mind. Perhaps something left undone.

How could I have forgotten?

He smells something. It is the scent of grilling meat from several doors down. It pulls him back, flailing, into the realms of consciousness. The aroma of charred cow brings an avalanche of memory. A mental filmstrip of barbecues, picnics, and bloody T-bone steaks.

Slowly the sharply defined characters dissolve, and leave Herman alone and paralyzed. To remember and to remember and to remember.

Bio: I am a reformed gypsy who has finally found a home. I moved to Asheville two years ago, and occupy my time as a student, aspiring social worker, writer and free spirit.