Principia
Dischordia and the Scent of the Locust
(Smashwords Edition)
by Blake Ryder
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© 2011 Transgressor
cover © Wam1975 | Dreamstime
Principia Dischordia and the Scent of the Locust
And there she sat; on the roof’s edge, twenty stories up, in the dark of the cold and wet night. The building was grim and grey, too old to blend with the others around it but not old enough to be yet expendable. There was only loft space now in the upper floors, and few residents using it. She knew that she would not be noticed. And she felt safe and secure and ready for all that she hoped to accomplish. It was to be a destiny of her own making and invention and she would have no regrets.
She was not afraid. No. Not tonight. She was invigorated. This was her night. She had had enough of the world – enough of its vanity, its brash, arrogant stupidity, its coarse vulgarity and its rampant, bloody opportunism. Tonight she would cheat death and take her own life. She was a young woman with a plan, a Goth facing the ultimate trip into the dismal void of the unknowing. Into a death more enticing in its mystery than anything life had to offer in its tormented, fragmented and despairing reality.
She thought of fragments of mediocre poetry she had read and once delighted in but which were in the end only illusory and brittle. She snickered and let a tear descend her cheek. It wasn’t from doubt; it was more the disappointment at once having been so young and naïve as to believe in the world and all it had to offer her. To believe in her father’s offers of a secret love. She thought of promises broken and dying friends and lying lovers. And her father. Always she thought of her father. He lingered in the back of her mind like an ink stain on the finest cloth, unable to be washed away completely.
Tonight she would finally escape him. Tonight she would take her own life and slowly feel her entry into a paradise more promising than any tedious adolescent sexual fumbling she had yet endured. Tonight she would give her all to find out the answer to the ultimate question: what lies beyond. She was a voyager. An explorer in the finest tradition of the world’s greatest unsung suicidal heroes and she longed to discover what there was to behold at the demise of a tired and wasted young life. She was straight tonight, afraid that her usual drugs may throw off her dedication to the cause now at hand, make her want to live. She was ready.
She slid the straight razor into her wrist and sliced downwards, the blood gushing forth from the wound, dribbling down her hand, weaving between her fingertips and cascading gently over the roof and dropping those twenty stories down into the alley below her. The pain was intense but slowly gave way to a kind of rhythmic throbbing and she could feel her heartbeat pulsate with each new spurt of blood. It made her body seem synchronous, in time and in tune with all. There was truly a dark and sinister grace in this kind of pain and she was thankful to be experienced of it. It was as spiritual as she knew it would be and she hoped not too ephemeral. It was… Romantic.
The city’s neon lights seemed sharper against the starry blackness. She inhaled deeply. The air was crisp and inviting. She exhaled a long, deep breath and steadied herself, squinting to see something flying in the distance. She swore she could see a crow dancing on the shadowy horizon but finally shrugged it off as an optical illusion, the first of many no doubt. That was what she wanted to experience most of all, a hallucinogenic death – to be overcome with visions and enter through them into the realm of the hereafter, transcending her twenty-something thin, gaunt physique, transcending those perceptions of a reality she found too cold and dismal and too inhospitably ugly to possibly endure any further.
The blood flowed profusely and she seemed slightly weaker, putting her hands to the roof edge to steady herself and prevent herself overbalancing and falling prematurely. She could hear the shadows gently hum, see the wind’s nocturnal rainbow of hazy neon slowly descend over the city, feel the light sprinkle of raindrops on her cheek.
And she blinked.
And in a bright flash it was all gone: the shadows, the neon, the crow, everything. Only the darkness remained as she stood up and, suddenly weightless, seemed to just hover in the air. Soon a bright, distant light came into her vision and she wanted to float towards it, only to find herself back on the rim of the building as the mushroom clouds spewed forth above the city and the luminous souls of the nuclear dead slowly seeped into the smoke and rose up into the fiery sky. She wasn’t dead yet, she thought, this was really happening. It was still real. All real. Too real.
The force of the distant explosion sent her backwards onto the roof.
Her whimper had become a bang.
She picked herself up and stood there, alone and confused. She could sense how pale she was, even more than usual. And slowly she floated upwards. And as she looked down, she could see her body lying there on the roof in a pool of scarlet. She could feel herself as one of many souls, all being pulled towards the heavens as tiny shards of coloured glass, glistening in the remnants of the apocalyptic flame.
It was the end of the world.
How perfect an irony, she thought, to commit suicide on Judgment Day.
After what seemed an eon of traveling through space, she saw the shards stop and hover at what seemed an enormous closed arched gate, consumed in an orange and blue bottomless flame. It was vagina-like and in its recesses she could sense a pleasure like no other she had longed to experience. It radiated warmth and felt innately like the home she had never known whilst alive, at least since her father had taken her away and shown her the awful potency of his special love for her.