WE ARE MADE OF WORMS - Printable Version

Is this what it's like to wake up for the first time?

The thought, lacking in articulation, was more feeling than narrative. It was to receive the sensation and marvel over it. This, of being suddenly awake--without invitation nor coaxing, nor even an introduction, just without warning alive. This feeling, waking up for the first time. Is that what this is?

Then why did it feel so much like it had been awake before this?

Too infantile to define the dull cognizance of development--it was just birth ascribing instinct to the body. The instinct of separating dream from real, and of realizing the dangers that came imminent with existence. No, it wasn't sleeping anymore. A place from a dream... Now, was that the dream, or is this the place? Where was it, exactly? What was it? It turned its arms out and splayed its fingers on the only breast it had ever known, the hard stone warm with womb-phlegm.

A crack bit through the muffled shroud. It was dim and sharp and came from below--down. Curious feet grazed the walls in search of disparity, and found it, a shape like a scar. It tried to touch it with its hands, but found itself cramped in too tight of anatomy. No, it wasn't... itself that was malformed, it was... this. These walls. This warmth, nurturing; nurturing until it became claustrophobic. Its limbs squirmed over themselves, encountering a second feeling that complemented instinct: discomfort. The need to move, to be free, to destroy in order to satiate.

And as though by sheer force of will to exceed its container, the fissures spread. It pushed and endeavored itself larger. The walls would yield as though they accepted this Fate to be shattered, dissolved, chaotically spread. Hairline fractures became jagged clefts. No pattern but that of anarchic webbing hacked corners and facets away from the cage, until finally, finally, finally it all fell away. In a crackle, in a clatter--the womb broke apart from the beast, and it tasted life. Warmth that went cold, wetness that was absent of wet, dark that was--still dark, but now it was on its hands and knees and it could breathe.

The floor was a puddle, and hard like the wall. The air choked its nubile lungs until it coughed mucus out of its throat. Immediately, there was a sense of other, and the beast came to understand a critical, albeit rudimentary third concept in identity; distinguishing the self from all else. It was itself, and there were other things that were themselves that it could hear and smell and feel. But somehow, they all felt the same. Like they were metaphysically connected. It felt a part of itself in the two feet that stood in front of it, in the four feet that stood in front of it, in some pale hair and marble elsewhere.

Are you me? Am I you? it was inclined to feel.

And it felt, a second later, the answer to its own question when something incorporeal guided its mental hands to light its first fire. The chill, it was taught immediately, was a mockery of the state of normalcy; which it was not, and neither was the beast. Neither stasis nor catalysis were natural. It was invasive. But let it be the master of its own identity, invasive--no, powerful.

A thing from beyond encourages it to burn. Or, at least, to want to.

Then I must be a part of you. You, who makes me burn and break things apart to be sated.

This was the place from its dream. The place was real, and it was real, and the dream was real; this was the place, this was the dream. She realized she was still asleep. She wouldn't be truly awake for a long time. But yes, she did want to be awake. Yes, she did want what came with wakefulness; she wanted satiation, and she wanted destruction, and she wanted to be herself and something that was powerful. She wanted to eat to be powerful; and yes, she was hungry.

Her heart throbbed. She raised her heavy, lolling head, and stared at the darkness lapping tactile at her yawning fingertips.

~~~

The instant the oily chrysalis shattered, a human toddler toppled out in a pool of dark, warm fluid soaking the stone. Translucent black mucus rubbed her skin, pale beneath the blush of youth; it licked her thin white hair against her scalp, dripped from her narrow eyebrows and nose button with baby fat. A reflection moved in the tiny black gem embedded perfectly in the back of her neck, just barely in view as a dash of bruise-purple, a birthmark under the skin. She was, in all aspects, a young and flawless echo of the species that was delivered for examination, but she was not ethereal or elegant or graceful.

She was small and frail and clumsy, gasping wet shards and loam in her pudgy fingers, struggling to find voice. Unable to directly fixate or even acknowledge the audience observing her, because she couldn't see them, because her straw-yellow eyes wouldn't see.

The babe wobbled and shivered, blind.