Endgame

Having played hide and seek with the swirling clouds, the rays of the fading sun flickered down through the station's high windows to illuminate the figure - wrenched from the tendrils of shadows that, until now, had kept him locked away. From the swirling darkness, a face, angel-like, and hair, like leaves, came into view. Behind it all, no heart to call his own, save for the one he took from his opponent, and returned in disjointed parts - as if someone had been twisted inside out. The man had, in quiet desperation, tried to fit together the scattered puzzle of the figure's identity. The figure knew far, far too much. The figure knew curiosities about his life that even he had not dared to whisper to a single soul. He leaned closer to him. The man's eyes widened as he looked through the waves of light that licked upon the dark shores and into the depths beyond. The rising static died for a moment, and his ears rang with the cacophony of the station. On some far off distant shore, he heard a clatter – the sound of metal on wood. Bells, whistles, children laughing, babies crying. Someone angrily carrying on a conversation on their phone. He felt so exposed and wrapped his long, dark coat about him. It took a moment for him to realize that his hand that had previously held the vital piece was shaking. His eyes glanced down to it like it was some phantom and saw as if imbued with superhuman ability, tiny beads of sweat forming, and the marbled look of pinkish skin and pale white. From anxiety, he knew, too much stress. But, in his sleep-deprived stupor, the skin looked like a patchwork quilt of living and rotting flesh sewn together. Something snapped. He could hear some thread in his mind break. Oh, he was Frankenstein's monster. Looking into the eyes of his creator, trying to understand why this flesh still beat with life: wishing, wanting, hungering for some kind of bond, approval, achievement, allowance to continue to breathe. What was the point of it all? Of keeping up appearances? Of waking early, dressing, cleaning, trudging through the days? To acknowledge the presence of another but never get any closer? To be a turbulent river underneath a layer of thick ice? To keep repairing with epoxy, the cracking porcelain mask of a smiling, laughing face behind which there was nothing but the lingering sense of a previous inhabitant? To be cursed to feel numb but still feel the crushing weight of emptiness? To be somehow both dead and alive – a hollow husk, an imposter, a ghost in this human-machine churned out by society's machinations? To run, run, run, run, run, run, run? If here he sat, unwilling, unable to meet the penetrating gaze issuing forth from the reflective depths of his opponent with the face of an angel and hair, like leaves, all carved from mahogany.