Upon returning home, the first thing that struck him in his still exhausted state was a bitter stench ruminating in the air. It was a foul odour that within an instant had clawed at his already eviscerated nerves and sent him dizzying to the floor. As he regained his composure, he knew that it was emanating from the bathroom. It may have been cold in his apartment, but it was not cold enough to prevent the ongoing decomposition. Without the ventilation he installed functioning as it once did, her rotting, blackening flesh dominated the room with its disdainful pungencies. He knew that as the rot continued and her organs liquified, the stench would only amplify in intensity as more screaming gasses would rupture from her ever-shrinking body as her once pearly teeth would tumble away from liquifying muscles and only her beautiful bronze hair would remain in its dire, withered form, clinging desperately to her sodden, submerged skull. All the while as these artefacts would drip away from the bones and dry up in the reeking air, the mold from her body would begin it’s advance, and creep up like a spider over the bathtub and scuttle along the walls, merging with the mold that already webbed over the walls within the dank shadowy cave of his apartment. And when her once passionate heart and her once silky skin and her once tender soul liquified and dried and spewed out a putrid cloud of sour miasma that would hang forever like a demented fog in the air, he knew that untraced and unfelt months would have passed since her death. It was only the shifting colours of her corpse, and now her gasses, that kept him anchored to time, but he knew that both would soon depart him. Thereafter, the only proof to him that time existed at all would be the stained gooey liquid of her heart sinking and sludging into the blood-drenched water beneath her bones before finally evaporating. And then, there would be no proof. There would be no time. There would only be the city, and his twisted dreams.

He splashed a glass of freezing water over his face to regain his alertness, only to find that it stung his cheeks and forehead like an acid. Grimacing, he collapsed onto his wrinkled leather sofa, deflating like the corpse in the room next to him. He pulled out the muddy videotape from his coat with a yawn and a twitch of the eyes, stroking it deliriously before crawling to the television, opening the enigmatic black case, and seeing that it was not a VHS tape, but in fact a DVD, he slid the disk into the innards of his television. He crawled back and watched, conscious of the very real possibility that this was yet another assignment from his employers. As his eyelids wavered, the screen churned and hissed and woke from its slumber.

There came a playful laugh of some sort, that echoed and reverberated around the room. There was still only static on the screen, but the static rippled like water, and occasionally cryptic images bubbled up to the surface. A hand, a smile, a face. Fields of old, days of youth. A first touch. The memories of some couple, he thought, a romantic vignette. A slight wind trickled among branches of trees, and a river quietly sang in the breeze. The static began to fade. The image laid itself bare before him, grainy and glitching, fidgeting within the screen, as if it was being transmitted live from somewhere unknown.

It was an image from his own dreams. It was her face. It was her endless smile. It was her pearly teeth, shining softly in the gentle sunlight that caressed her golden skin. It was her beautiful tendrils of bronze hair, dancing in the branches and waving in the wind. She had placed a white rose in her hair and her hazelnut eyes gazed through the screen and towards him where he sat sinking into his seat as the light from the screen crept up from below, harshly illuminating his strained and distorted features. She continued to stare at him, unfazed by his ghastly visage. Then the screen shuddered, a wave of static emerged, then departed. She was now regarding herself, her eyes closed, head turned from him, a twitching hand in her hair. Then the static rippled over the screen once more. She was staring at him again, as she was before. Then the static came again, and her eyes were closed again, as they were before. This repeated, over and over, as blotches of white light zig-zagged over the screen and burned the pixels, and the television continued to churn.

Stolen story; please report.

At every repetition, he felt as though something would happen, something would change. He remained glued to his seat; his eyes transfixed by the searing electronic heat of the screen as its itching pixels continued to formulate the exact image of his dead wife’s face. But it was not her face according to a photograph, it was her face according to his eyes, according to his mind. The whole world behind the screen seemed to be the very world in his dream - a dimension, he knew, to not be derived from reality, but from fantasy. It was as if someone had livestreamed onto a projector his mind’s eye and recorded the playback, for what purpose he knew not. All he knew is that there were no eerie blossoms nor any whispers in the wind to talk to him now. Would they say that every man and his woman have a disc like this, also? He could only ponder as he sank further into the leather beneath him, and his eyes could not look away and he could not bring himself to move.

He was then aware of a slight, sinister droning, almost inaudible, that accompanied the footage, that made his eardrums shudder. As it did so, the footage began to snap occasionally, and in sudden flashes between the loop of her face were other images, but these were not of his dreams. These were of him and his wife in the waking world. They would be walking through the city, holding hands in the rain. She would be sleeping on his shoulder on the bus. He would be holding her hand in the cinema. She would be planting a rose on their windowsill. He would be in the midst of an argument with her. His arms would be outstretched, his mouth agape, her shoulders hung low, her brow furrowed even lower. It would be about their need for money, her discomfort with the city, his need to work. It always was. How could he convince someone so carnally antagonised by the environment in which they lived? There was no logic to it. In those moments, she was a child, and he hated her. All she had to do was live at home planting the plants and grooming the room and preparing the food, whilst he ventured deep into crevices of the city of what nature he dared not wonder, fulfilling assignments. He would bring the money home, she would spend it, he would save the rest. They were happy most days, but some days when their prayers for a child felt to be in vain and the city’s sickly air nagged at her nerves too strongly, they would argue like this. But it was only a very small part of their lives, and a thankfully rare occurence. Most days he was calm, and she was strong. Why did it linger so in the film? A tear snaked down his stinging cheek.

…What would it be like, to have your entire life recorded, and watched over by a stranger, replaying it endlessly? Would they come to know you? Would they understand?... Or would they only see the surface of your existence, judge only your actions, and not the heart that stirred them, or the soul that would aim and hit, or miss, and struggle, and wane, and tangle itself up in that which it honestly was not but that which was foreign to it, that which prodded inwards and infected it all the same… The soul is a leper. Once a flower, now a wretch, a dying mockery of itself, a victim to existence, a once innocent and pretty creature that dreamed of so much only to be torn and twisted and tortured into a shameful aberration that scares and disgusts those that see it from afar, and everyone wishes to turn a blind eye to such a thing, for no one wants to pity something they are so disgusted by…

…Or maybe the soul was always a wretch that had delusions of grandeur. Maybe it was a primal unruly thing with a cure within its reach. And maybe its failure is worthy of shame… Am I trying to save my own soul, through this disparagement? Damn me, but I cannot be to blame for all of this, please!

…If this is my life recorded here, and someone is to see it… what do they think of me?