Maxwell's Demon

Here's a micro short story I wrote for a mate, to tie in with his gloomy Lovecraftian electronica. Just stumbled across it whilst clearing out my desktop. It's a bit 'flowery' in its language, but I like it.

Maxwell's Demon

I want to wrench the sun from its perch and drown it in spit, crushing and pressing it down until it collapses in on itself. Dark matter, a black hole. Diamonds in an empty cosmos, reflecting nothing. It punctuates a picture I no longer want to see... a man, hunched shoulders giving the image of a desiccated spider's corpse. A perch of rain soaked rocks over Atlantic coast, the edge of the sunken world.

That face, those lines of concern and self pitying anguish, skin quivering either from tears or from the movement in the brackish sea water. Kelp lurches past, locked in an embrace with rotting wood lost from land, miles from home.

Those eyes cut into me, grey as ghost skin. Maxwell.

The surface twitches with a new zephyr that tosses a sticky mass of hair across cheeks that seem too sharp for humanity. A tongue, almost purple with cold, licks cracking lips and savours the blood vessels that have seeped through their makeshift doorways and made their escape.

Revulsion is all I can register when I look at that face, staring back at me from behind the shifting foam. The face is mine, but I feel no connection to it.

Death is too good for such a creature, but it is all that waits. Deeds are done and deeds are known and deeds are felt with regret, but they are never undone. There must be a resolution.

Did the child scream, or had it simply been his own soul expelling its last shred of humanity before spiralling away?

The body still lies a little way off, water pressing in on it and leaving a halo of foetid scum on the blood soaked clothes. Perhaps the lapping waves were urging the thin legs into an awkward jig upon the polished pebbles, but the face doesn't move to look. Rheumy eyes remained fixed on mine.

Rain begins to stab at the image, bursts of movement on a face that registers nothing.

There must be an end.

I reach forward towards the surface, my thin fingers twitching with anticipation as I curve my body towards the threshold, the plane that marks the divide, the ever shifting tide.

The surprise on his face is a marked change as my hand plunges from the water to grab his feeble throat. The flaps of ageing skin that encircle his neck slip and slide over convulsing tendons.

With a single wrench of my arm my quarry is within the frozen waves.

Air is a memory that is expelled.

A haze of blood from a broken mouth stretched to a scream.

There is no reflection of a man who cannot call himself a man, only the demon.

I am Maxwell's Demon.

I was Maxwell's Demon.