"That'll be fifteen dollars ninety-nine" The cashier wrapped all the packets of bacon into a polythene bag and Skyler swiped his card. The store was half empty and supplies were yet to come. The windows and the flickering lights failed to lighten up the darkness in the corners, filled with webs and spiders. There was life, spreading out, reaching the walls and it rolled itself, it fell back into the centre, like spiderwebs.
Glizzly held a canned pumpkin puree in his hands while looking at the spiders, static and at peace. He heard Skyler pick up his plastic bag, the crimping plastic and the sounds of his feet and brushed against the floor, like an old man. The cashier brushed the breadcrumbs from his beard and pressed his feet back against the counter, relaxing himself in his chair and picking his book back up, titled "Lilium Smoke" Glizzly gazed at him as if gazing at a valley of lilies, light resting on the tips of eyelids, they heard the sound of the ocean, together.
Skyler walked down the broken pavement, crushing the flowers growing between the cracks on the road, he got into his mother's car and looked at Cypher sitting in the car parked beside him. He was smoking a cigarette while staring back at Skyler. He lowered his gaze and got inside the car. He pressed his hand on the steering wheel, while Cypher looked ahead at the store and started the car. Soon, Skyler heard the cashier yelling, "POLICE! HE MUGGED ME! SOMEONE GET HIM!" And Glizzly ran out of the store, with change jingling in his pockets, and his fists full of money, knife but dignity. He frantically jumped inside the car from its top and Cypher screamed amusingly, driving off while the cashier was left running behind.
He ran a few metres, then among the flaps of fat of his own body, he fell to the ground, covered in sweat and dirt, he screamed in anger. Skyler walked out of his car and stood behind it. As he looked at the old cashier, he gazed at him as if he were gazing at the fallen city of troy, light piercing his eyelashes, striking him in the eyes. He squinted under the sun. Soon, under a wave of sleep. He fell flat to the ground.
When he got up, it was dark already. He brushed his clothes and looked up at the ocean, the stars in the sky reflected on the ocean waves, and the water glistened. It was a storm. He walked towards the rocks. The beach looked stranded as if all life had suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth. The new moon made the sky seem to have a light of its own, a thundering disaster, curling inwards, and falling on everything that ever lived, and ever will.
Even when he was in that moment of defiance, the defiance to let your humanity be charmed by nature into doing the wildest things. Nature, in its evolutionary battle, is not a romance to be followed, but rather a reality of violence and constant trauma, Skyler wanted to experience naked nature, in all its animality and in-human aspects.
Humanity and nature could never co-exist.
Because to be human is to control the strength to destroy, but nature is destruction.
Nature lacks emotions and morality.
It does whatever it has to...to ensure that only the epitome of us were allowed expression. To prosper. To be alive.
While rearranging this guilt in his mind, of killing Edgar and his mother, Skyler wondered why his hatred towards his own race consumed him. But as he walked towards the beach, he felt a plastic wrapper crush under his feet. An old, dirty wrapped, half buried under the soil and the flowers growing upon it. Skyler picked it up and looked around.
'I remember a time it used to be clean,' He spoke to himself in his mind as he walked towards the rocks, reaching for the beach,
'Why do we ruin the things we touch? Why do we alienate ourselves from what's around us, when we are a part of everything we know? Hate humans, I abhor them. I hate that I am one of them.'
Cyril got on top of his surfboard and moved across the violent waves, "TRISTIAN!" He screamed across the waters, looking around for his teammate, "TRISTIAN! ANSWER ME!"
'I feel more connected to nature, not because it holds the power to give me life yet take it away, death the least of fear, what I fear is...This planet is slowly becoming devoured by weak people. People who don't deserve to live among nature, and deep within, they know it, they know that if nature were to select the finest human specimens, it would not be them.
So, in turn, they turn to destroy nature and torment her before she can torment them. We sully our blue skies with eternal darkness, shrink the oceans to lamentations and seal the air into poisonous oblivion, all to hide our bodies...in a chamber of disguise... eternally.
Cyril looked up at the growling sky, and at the rotting water beneath him. The waves slowly curved themselves and his board began shaking. And finally, the board broke into two under the strong hydro pressure, and he fell into the water and went down into the whirlpool. "NO! THE OCEAN CAN'T KILL ME!" Cyril trapped his arms around as he tried to make his way, but everything was as dark as it could be, and the water was constantly pushing him down.
He felt so betrayed.
Arthur and the lifeguards stood inside the safety beach house with their binoculars, "It's so dark, I can't see anything,"
"It'd be a miracle if that lad makes it," The officers said. Arthur looked worried, "Tristian...Cyril..."
"Whose there?!" The officials yelled and Arthur looked at the beach, seeing a dark shadow. He recognised him by his posture, "Skyler?"
Skyler stood before the violent ocean,
"You and I are now at war against all of humanity,"
Cyril's limbs went numb and he felt his vision become hazy as moonlight seemed to fall upon him from the surface of the water. He looked at his palms, the light was coming from within him. And it became brighter and brighter until the body turned to light and everything else just disappeared.
"CYRIL"
He woke up and found himself in his old room. His old room. The ceiling was freshly painted and the walls were covered with wood and posters of bands that he once liked. He remembered his room, and its scent, it was all so nostalgic. But something was different about it, like the herbs growing on the ceiling, the blue wood on the wall and the grey, stone door. He got down from his bed of flowers and white, satin sheet that slipped from his naked body.
He walked towards the door and saw an engraving carved on its top,
I warn you of the acts of the flesh
He remembered hearing that somewhere in his childhood, with an old, broken radio playing near the seashore and his father, tilling his beloved garden, with a straw hat on his head, and rubber slippers on his feet. The flowers he grew were always bright, but they withered away within a few days, matching the dull, wooden fences around their yard, and the drying grass.
But as he stood before their old yard, all he could see was nature in bloom. The trees and shrubs had grown so dense and excessive that no light could penetrate through the garden. The vines grew all over the fence, making the fence bend backwards, shifting into an oblique. That garden looked like a huge, spider web.
The air was salty and the soil water-logged. His feet sank into the mud as he tried to make his way to the other side. Dirty, disgusted and yet crawling like an insect on a hairy woman's skin, he tore the purple and blue wildflowers. It was only after moving inside that cocoon of vegetation, that he found out that its inside was empty, creating a hollow. He tore the other side of the hollow and fell over the fence, outside the garden.
He looked ahead at the beach, full of tombstones and bright red bricks upon those lavender tombs. As the wind blew, those sands flew elsewhere, revealing open graves of skeletons. He heard a distant metallic voice, like a tin shield hitting something hard. And he walked across the graves, towards the ocean, finding a tin, Australian flag struck between two rocks, and dangling between them, producing a heavy discord in that seemingly eternal peace.
Somehow, life felt like that which is a very short time when compared to forever, like a drop of ocean water or a grain of sand along a beach. The sky was a dark blue, fluttering under the sunlight, as on a very hot day. And even though that landscape was what he grew up with, it was very unfamiliar to him. Only a few things that the reef or the garden reminded him of his childhood, everything else seemed to be...
Not of his world.
-To be continued
Skyler Moris
Undercover Blue Riot