Teach Me How To Fly a Plane: An Insomniac's Guide to Falling

adam carson (short story)

some very long overdue gore and a potential for cannibalism; enjoy.

The wind ripped itself apart, coming to a halt outside an old brick building far on the east side. It wrapped its form around the entire block of apartments, fumbling under windowsills and door frames in search of this wild night's crime.

"What do you want?" The wind asked the boy through a pane of cloudy glass. "What more could you want? What do you kill for? What are you prepared to die for?"

"I don't want anything. I'm hungry, I just want to eat." The boy pulled velvet curtains to block out the words of the greedy wind, and turned back to his work. The table before him was covered in cheap surgical instruments and vials of liquid that not even his superiors knew the properties of. A woman across the room gagged against the knot in her mouth and shiny tears rolled down her cheek, hitting the metal table below her. She whined quieter, fear and frenzy and unwarranted betrayal swirling just beneath the surface of her pupils; her body shivered violently.

Adam Carson, Adam Carson. The boy rolled his name over and over in his mind and then couldn't remember if he had actually said it or not. Adam Carson.

Adam untwisted a dull blade from its handle and replaced it with a fresh one, dropping the former into a glass jar with a soft click. He rubbed his face and his eyes and ruffled his hair, half-heartedly shaking sleeplessness from his bright features.

"Have your wisdom teeth been removed?" Adam asked the woman – Gracie was her name.

Gracie stared at him, disbelieving and confused.

"Your teeth, the ones in the back," Adam prodded his own mouth in example. "Do you still have them?"

Gracie hesitated but shook her head, flinching back when Adam frowned.

He stood thinking for several long moments, until the tools before him offered a better distraction than did the missing molars.

Eventually, as the night wore on, Gracie's crying muffled to the point of silence and the wind bore against the outer walls in a display of harsh persistency. Adam ignored it with similar persistence but much less success. His brain beat against his skull with the pounding of the walls.

He turned a stray instrument over and over in his fingers until they were stained orange with rust. He tapped it once against his seat before crossing the room to the metallic table-bed where Gracie still lay. She eyed the scalpel skeptically before immediately and violently thrashing as Adam pressed it into her mouth.

The lower-middle class was Adam's favorite pool of patients; they weren't poor enough to dismiss their own hygiene yet weren't rich enough to waste money on whitening solutions. Gracie's mouth was all clean and neat without erring on unnaturally pearlescent, or even on particularly bright. She had a good smile, a perfect one, to Adam, and he was going to take it from her.

As soon as the rope was out of her mouth, she swore and begged and bargained until her mouth was unceremoniously filled with his fingers and tools. She cried, and tried to bite until her gums were too raw to clamp down, and then she cried more. When her teeth were in a bowl and her blood was pouring out of her face, Adam began slicing her curled brown hair at the roots. She seemed surprised not to have to go through a scalping, and Adam, too, was surprised that this small comfort even registered in her mind, what with her body parts laid out next to her head. He took one of his many small vials and pulled its clear liquid into a long syringe which he then stuck into Gracie's left side. Next, he took her clothes; carefully cut them down until they could be pulled out from under her and discarded on the floor. Before she could get over the shame of being undressed, before her heart could slow down to the intended rate, Adam thrust a short kitchen knife into her abdomen and ripped upwards. Gracie howled high and hysterical until even the wind joined her, and Adam sighed in relief.

"You don't have to," the wind begged him. "You don't, you don't. She will die but you don't have to, you can get up and leave and never come back. Never come back to this place, Adam Carson; live and leave and never return to this city."

Adam frowned and wiped the woman's blood on his favorite hoodie, since his jeans were too soaked with it already. "I don't want to leave. I like it here... I like her, and her hair and probably her spleen, maybe her heart. I want her heart and I want you to go away."

"You don't know that, you don't know what it's like. This isn't a human-want, Adam. This isn't a human desire at all."

"Then maybe I don't want to be human, either."

"It's not your human part that's saying that."

Adam watched Gracie writhe forever with his hand twisted in her mess of a stomach, until she finally went silent and still.

"It's not too late," the wind tried, wavering with grief as it filled the room. "Leave."

Adam watched, as he pulled out unidentifiable organs, as he placed them in Tupperware dishes, as he carved skin from warm flesh.

"I'm hungry," he said, voice thick and scared. "I just want to eat."