That molded silence stunk of dead air, as a dull, cavernous screech came from inside my father’s pregnant belly. A small, decapitated fetus festered there neatly, folded in right between the molded rot of his intestinal tract. Father was sliced down, from neck to navel, where charred, rubbered skin cinched itself a labia in the very middle of his stomach, nimbly framing a bubble-gummed embryo with bulbous purpled veins. The fetus was crying in mumbled, capricious coos, mushy electronic harmonies that filled the darkness with a humidity of hot dread. My father couldn’t speak; his mouth too stitched up with strings and knots of his own forlorned genitalia while his soft, untempered brown eyes had given way to slits of yellowed jaundice. His skin had turned pigish, hotly pinked, and all fuzzed-up, an all-over elastic kind of roughness. He began to oink in short mucal snorts and murmurs, all-snotted up and suspiciously inhuman while he motioned his pregnant condition at me. A smirk of surprised dread and jugular confusion tore across his nervous system with blunt, pitiful force. Well then, who inseminated you? I asked. Nothing; dead-eyed. A virgin birth? I tried again. All he managed was a small, innocuous grunt. 

Before this, the man father donned a cage of stiff, vigorous iron that clung to him like cooled wax. A shiny, lawful suit for an indoctrinated schizoid man. When he had transitioned between the two forms though, I couldn’t be sure. It had been decades since I saw him last and now somehow, we were reunited under circumstances neither of us could make much sense of. Were we summoned here? The fetus started plucking at the skin around him, slapping and popping at the resilience of my father’s thick epidermis, trying to understand its true elasticity; how much more room it had to grow. I still couldn’t exactly comprehend the immediate environment around us, as any notion of light grew totally fat, then detonated into a pinguid of muted black fog. It was an abstract, stagnant nothing, totally desolate of any reality, sort of an innocuous void of the completely unintelligible, growing further and further unto a dark infinity. The only light to go by came from the swimming fetus; a neon amber, alien glow with piss-poor, unhelpful radiance, shining light only upon its host’s upper body. My father continued to oink rapidly, though now in more hurried, fretful gulps and I was still attempting to skirt a sense of environment from the void around us. 

But the oinks he now mustered grew into berserk fits of unmitigated rage, guttural and with a heavy, loud throat; seemingly frightened by the sudden, shifting growth of his head, which was considerably more distended and thick than mere seconds ago. His neck began to sway back and forth from the sheer weight, having a frenetic tantrum that resembled a faulty, glitched-out animatronic amped up on crude an. His eyes jerked upwards towards his head and oscillated there sadistically, on the verge of fulminating altogether. In the blink of an eye, large, drumming boils, oozing with rotting puss, crusting themselves all over his fevered skin as he attempted to yield a rowdy scream. The fetus groaned with the immediate change of motion, threading itself in and out of the intestines in an erratic seizure. It glew itself a hazy, muddled orange before disappearing altogether, swimming upwards inside my father’s throat to nest there. Perhaps birthing was imminent, though I couldn’t be sure. Without even the suggestion of the fetal glow, I couldn't make out my father’s shadow, more or less detect any implication of crowning. The oinks and screaming murmurs grew faint and far until disappearing altogether, an intentional blip malfunctioned him out of all circuited timelines. 

I stood quite still, waiting; waving my hands downwards to the darkness, fathoming and feeling around the blackness for any sliver of truth or suggestion to a formidable reality that I was familiar with. But there was nothing but a dewy, gelatinous ground to walk upon and my father and his fetal light were gone. The ancient stillness grew into something strangely operatic, with humming Gregorian whispers and slurried clicks and fuzzy glitches that grew syrupy around the eardrum. A whopping pressure struck forward on my calvaria as though a heavy, mechanical hand pushed the skull upwards towards the viscid, opaque gravity. Truth be told, I have no recollection of my time immediately before this place. I could make out gaunt strokes of rambling, inconspicuous concepts: vaginal birth to a vague, unshaped adulthood; but my last, contiguous memory wasn’t so easily discernible; like I was only ever born inside this vacuous space and knew nothing but life inside it. Death seemed inherent, given that I had consciously felt my cerebral synapses become dutifully unwired and each brainstem fuse harshly ripped apart with a godless indulgence. A vague, mechanical separation of soul and body was beginning to take place, seemingly puppeteered by what I assumed to be a mysterious deity. But I really had no perspective, whether I was dead or alive, though I assumed I’d eventually find out. 

The dankness of the space seemed to stretch outwards as a hot sugared taffy would, clotted in languid threads with a heavy, condensed stick. The loud, chattering noise surrounding the darkness now grew into full mouthfuls of booming incantations, harsher and more inhuman. A sludge of polar air crawled above the atmosphere, a sort of motionless cyclone that roused smells of putrid sulfurs and rotten grains while the slabbering, nonsensical incantations became thunderous shrieks and wails of pure glitch noise, both surreal and abrasive. It resembled a kind of congregational spell with an obvious conviction, a directed, intentional malice. The noise of the so-called spell eventually crescendoed and waned into an unkempt silence. A sudden, lymphatic shut-down seized my body, as all the compositional tissues, bloods, and gasses began to pool at my swollen, inflated heels. What was left of my nervous system was an anesthetized syrup of a wet, unconscious nebulous, way too weary to transmit or receive. Whatever thoughts I could muster wormed around cranial lobes like a sluggish, fat leech. 

I fainted to the ground, my back now up against whatever black sludge jelly terra firma this place was composed of. Whatever was happening, I felt the unnatural urge to succumb. The black glutinous sludge moved quickly, enveloping my body wholly, as though it demanded me its sacrificial scarab, entombed in its weird dark amber. Time was lapping itself into a folded Mobius strip, circling backwards and forwards and around itself with a tight, enigmatic knit. There were decades, centuries, and millennia around me, as I watched them stitch themselves together and then recede apart. The fluid lapse of the universe came and went while I watched it dissolve and reemerge into pools of reflective light. My breathing became muted, paced, and well-reserved, while the expanse of the space around me grew colossal, then obtuse then dwindled to the size of a needlepoint, shifting sizes and stratospheres simultaneously. It was clear to me now that the space I was in was indeed fully alive. 

As soon as the realization clicked, monstrous, muscular veins flowing surged, and bright cyan-colored blood began illuminating the dark sky as if they were flashes of lightning. I had tried to scream, but a kind of thick, acidic mucus had already infected my throat. The beast ascended itself upwards, mounting a much further elevation. It wailed some kind of war cry and I slid backward from the sludge with a tumultuous gravity, ending up somewhere much farther than where I had been. Shaken, I found stability in what seemed to be a pocket of flesh, centering myself there in preparation for another shift in gravity. Is this a kind of pseudo-nightmare? The last sporadic kick of a dying brain? A kind of drug-induced picture show? Whatever it was, the cold space quickly resumed its isolating blackness without hesitation. The movement ceased altogether and the isolation lingered and soon the oppressive sheet of humidity fell back into the atmosphere. I felt entirely nonexistent at that moment. Something of a singular energy existing somewhere in a plane of hobbled reality never once fondled by the touch of time or space; way before life crawled its way out of its first harsh, ruinous eon. Any subtle movement seemed inherently finicky in this rapturous microcosm, a single touch at a black hole could create thousands of civilizations and any quick slap at that galactic plasma would pummel those civilizations into total ruin. 

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I couldn’t stomach my mind's alignment, nothing seemed to thread together to form any sort of cohesive assimilation. Memories were floating out the nose, becoming soupy and lofty with a bumbling, boisterous itch until my mind had been nearly wiped of cognizance; wedged in between both sentient and insentient means. I felt a graveled, mucilaginous cement stir behind my eyelids, as pressure mounted to the tops of my eyeballs like some mysterious phantom pressing dutifully on my eyes with a tyrannical, concentrated force, hell-bent on popping them out and down my throat. The thick, sinewy flesh of the beast around me was throbbing in a tempo too erratic to be at all comforting, though the vibrations did ease my now sour-curdled bowels. Whatever beast I was stomached in had continued to sluggishly glide itself throughout what I had just assumed was a sort of expansive galaxy, though there was no way to be certain. The motion became quite hypotonic until it lay heavy on my tailbone. I tried to adjust the weightlessness of my body to achieve a semblance of assurance, but the spine had begun buzzing with a sickly drowse and before I knew it, a small pool of white light gathered itself in the middle of the stomach, glowing perfectly spherical, both dastardly and sterile. It leaned forward for a monstrous bite, evaporating the entirety of me directly into its center. 

I awoke sometime much later in a fit of drenched rage, clammy with a full-bodied fever and awash with a gooey delirium so sinister I was certain I’d been infected with the brunt of a treacherous fungal disease. Whatever the environment now felt like a similar nothingness to the beast, this time covered in studies of large swathes of hazy greens and purplish blues. It had the same surreal complexity of the previous black nothingness, this time sweetened with an uncanny, astringent flavor completely unbeknownst to me. The spherical light-energy had seemingly swallowed me whole and I now existed somewhere in its heart valve, my body assuming the shape of a coagulated vein, puckered and tight. I wiggled around for movement, but the pressure stuck between the vein walls was unyielding. Big coughs for air were followed by short, tenuous gasps but the effort was immediately interrupted by sudden swarms of mammoth locusts whirring around in the back of my throat. They bounced back and forth between the trachea wall, rubbing themselves amongst the plaster of congealed mucus that stuck dutifully to the sides. There was nothing for me to vomit, though the ceaseless buzzing of what now seemed to be hundreds of thousands of locusts, now just far-off ancestors of those who lived just moments ago, induced gagging so audacious that the breathless momentum struck me senseless.

 There were globs of thick, syrupy tears stuck in mid-motion and I couldn’t manage a singular moment of oxygen. The thin pithy flesh in between the vein grabbed onto me with a skin-tight stronghold, in a Herculean vacuum so full of heinous pressure I could feel the walls of the vein fiercely serpentine around my entire body, attempting to suffocate me in my entirety, chewing up bones and all. The lungs lurched with an amass of dead weight, like an oppressive, nuclear bomb quickly atomizing behind the ribs. The dense, tearful gagging smoldered like chemical acid while the fourth-generation locusts migrated downwards to the esophagus, crawling and gnawing their way down the intestines, feeling like an amass of burning chunks of volcanic ember. I had now lost the inability to inhale at all. I was being completely reborn in some kind of apathetic experiment, dutifully puppeteered by devious means of tortuous ambivalence, a sort of cosmic dough plaything, shaped and sculpted by an ungodly deity glutton for a certain sugary pink blasphemy. 

It was obvious now that my memory had been wiped clean, though the uncertainty of my body’s extinction was less than clear. I wasn’t sure what of me remained true flesh and blood, it seemed to have been made quite malleable and fluid, now existing somewhere near a superficial hybrid of apathetic human and honest anthropoidal. Just caught up in a little game of reanimation with no immediate agency. A loud, extraneous pop of a bone, and I began to feel my skin contort and contrast like a pliant rubber, bubbling up at the surface and refolded into new blistering graphs of alien pigmentation. I was costumed to stand trial, surely. A new, made-over iconography for the plight of past sins. Weariness crept up like a hardened, clotted artery as I made peace with my apathetic future. It was purgatory, that mystery seemed inevitable now. 

Of course it was, I was silly to think so obtusely. I was dead. A certain plight to Hell with a road paved with bricks of coagulated blood and this was the beginning of my journey there. The walls in which I was wedged suddenly gave way to movement as I squirmed myself out of the sheath-like jugulars. Before long, I reached the lipid crust of the vein and gnawed loose. The blood-red brick was there in front of me, wrapping itself like a garden python unto the ascending vista. Clouds of clotted grays loomed near the atmosphere, dripping some strange secretion that smelled of burnt motor oil and steeped lilac flowers. The road had a flabby, uncertain step that fidgeted with an apprehensive foot of movement. It fluttered with a deep, gelatinous pulse as I began to step forward. The road was alive and the journey towards my trial had already begun.

That path sauntered onwards and up towards eternity, weaving itself forward like a relaxed, infinite noose. I marched onward for what felt like lightyears camouflaged in gulps of tiny seconds, disorienting as it was fiercely surreal. There was seemingly little movement in the environment around the red-bricked road, except for short little fragments of kaleidoscopic light that gleaned and then wanned in apathetic bursts. The ground immediately surrounding was charred and barren with an occasional outcropping of puddles with molten silver ooze, arising a vapor addled with harsh, simmering petrol. There too were short gusts of wind, each carrying hysterical whispers of audacious torment that stuck to the ear like a wet tongue. You could even hear paltry, melancholic echoes, buoyantly drifting the rough sounds of torn flesh. If you cupped your hand to the rhythm of the wind, you could detail the ferocious snap of each skin fiber tearing away from its weary ligaments. 

A long, dastardly moan settled the ground, and a sudden, electronic crack ripped forwards, crackling with the raw, frenetic noise of hot rippling static. It hovered like lightning but stuck ferocious in the air like a wrinkle in time. A stone-face emerged from the glowing slice, a somber, disintegrated sculpture of a solemn, Greecian man. The man resembled some sort of nameless, long-forgotten philosopher, too terribly paranoid and uncertain for any worthwhile legacy. He was without a sculpted body, just his monolithic face, levitating there with a certain amount of dominant might. His mouth became undone, moving up and down as if it was on a controlled hinge, but no noise came forth. It was miming a silent speech through its open jaw. Eventually, a booming, megalithic voice merged with its movement, sputtering with stereophonic sizzle. The Baby Is Born it clapped. He Is Resting.