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Withered wet leaves were his pillow; humus — his mattress, last pieces of clothing he had — his blanket and burial shroud. Air still haven't left his lungs, but he already said his last goodbyes. Taste of the bile got stuck in his mouth; he was dragging tongue over his cracked lips and was listening to his bones crackling as if they were wooden cabins caught in a big fire.
Blue covered his face. Wind was growing meaner; body wanted to shiver, but muscles didn't obey, just trembled in random spasms. He always thought: death would be painful and scary. It will come for him and grab him by his throat, squeeze in a strong grip. And then loosen it, when vessels in the eyes would pop and sclera would be filled with red. And start choking him again. And it'll be this way, until he gives up.
He got warm on the forest soil, and there was no pain. Just a handful of regrets and a drop of fear. And even that drop was flowing away from him then he was thinking about how he has no place to come back: he was born without the feeling of home, just never found it — and will come back to God's embrace without it. And even in this embrace he'll never find this feeling: he'll brake out and return to earth — to wander the infinite desert where any turn is the same.
***
Simon felt strange worry: he wanted to go out, hide somewhere, put his thoughts into something so his head would become empty. He couldn't sit in one place and nothing spiked his interest that night; eventually, he gave up and decided to take a walk.
It was cold and humid outside. Glowing eyes of street lights reflected in rippled puddle water. Simon's legs carried him away from suburb as if his body knew that something was waiting for him deep in the forest behind the rooftops. He went there often: in the forest he was free of people disturbing him, and he wasn't worried about himself. But Simon never went there after the sunset. Words of his mother rattled in the head, telling him that it's quite easy to get lost in the dark forest, and hard to get found. Sometimes Simon really wanted to get lost, erase himself from the canvas of the society painting, but he feared to get more helpless, more incorporeal than he is now.
Dark boots sinked in brown mush: a lot of forest soil got washed away by rains. Mud squished under his feet, but Simon kept walking forward — past thin trees, right into the darkness. He liked the smell of humus and forest coldness; he stopped beside fallen, eaten by bugs tree, listening carefully to the fading breath of the nature. Something interrupted steady noise; some extra detail, distortion on a recording. Simon twitched — fear quickly clouded his brain. But he knew that big animals wouldn't roam near the town; and he knew that a person would be more dangerous to him than an animal.
He inhaled more air into his lungs as if he was getting ready to dive into deep waters, and wandered away from the strange sound. However, because of the anxiety boiling in his veins, he couldn't exactly tell which side the sound was coming from, so he started wandering off in a random direction.
Simon kept his eyes on a clearance between the trees, where Kirkville was standing. He wasn't looking under his feet at all until he tripped over something soft. "Something" made an unhappy internal gurgling. Simon, for some reason, thought about a big toad; he also thought that he squished it, and also thought that this was its final breath. He felt sick immediately. He looked down. Something long and black was lying on the ground. But it wasn't a fallen tree. And it wasn't a deer that fell asleep forever.
It was a person. He barely breathed, his skin had an unhealthy green tone to it; he slightly turned his head away from Simon, as if he didn't want anybody to notice his presence.
"You want to be alone?"
Person was silent.
"Why are you lying here?"
Person kept being silent.
"Are you going to leave?"
Person let all the air escape his lungs and then breathed in with a hiss, as if he had several holes in his skin.
"Can I lie down with you?"
Simon didn't wait for the answer; he crushed the leaves with his hands and lied down next to the body. He was icy and wet, like life already left him. And all of the body trembled: rarely, periodically.
"Do you not want to talk? Or can't?"
"I can. Just don't see a reason."
Voice of the body was quiet and raspy. Simon had a thought that this person hasn't talked to anyone for a long time, doomed to be alone at his own will.
"Why?"
"All of the words I had to say had already been said by someone else."
"And mine too?"
"And yours."
Clothes were getting wet quickly, and Simon started shaking. But he wasn't going to get up: it seemed to him that he finally found a hole in the world that he had to fill with his existence. He still had childlike naive mind, and it seemed to him that no one should leave unknown.
"Why did you leave?"
"Because I didn't know what I lived for."
"And what did you do?"
"Had fun, talked to everyone, loved with my words, while in reality I was attached only to the quick pleasure. I fought, stole and suffered, betrayed, like any other immoral, devoid of faith person," he coughed. "I was born without a head and died without a face."
Simon didn't understand completely words of the body. They sounded to him like phrases from a movie script. And exactly this raised his interest.
"Nobody will remember you?"
"There is no one who could remember. I said my goodbyes to everything long time ago. But really — I didn't have anyone to say goodbye to."
"You were a void..."
Simon made an immediate conclusion, and body went silent. They were lying on the back of the sleeping world and were listening to its heartbeat. Past the forest, in the Kirkville, dogs were barking. Little birdy was rummaging through the roots of the nearby bush in the dark. Simon was listening carefully to the story of the nature for the first time, and it was so exciting and astounding that he couldn't breathe.
"I am void now."
And Simon felt it. He touched his hand. It was wiry, rather hard, as if there was no fat under the skin, only bone and tense muscles. It was weightless like organza. Simon reached out to his palm and squeezed his fingers. Body didn't react at all. Hands were covered in dirt.
"Since you had no meaning in life, and nobody needed you, and you want to leave this world, then I will treasure and remember you so you have a meaning and somebody who needs you."
"All of my life was covered in cigarette haze. I was making my way through it and was thinking — this is so easy. And then cough started, and I got sick. It wasn't easy, I just never noticed because troubles were coming one after another, and I was drinking them away with "liquid joy" — and was getting happier, and it was all the same. At that point I didn't know why I was comforting and healing myself — I didn't know, I didn't know," Simon heard body's sobs and felt how hard his fingers were squeezing his palm, and uncut nails digging into gentle skin pained him, but he put up with pain, not even considering whether he should put up with it in the first place. "I didn't know and I continued. I was in the sterility. It doesn't have color, but it has tranquility and fresh air. I cut off umbilical cord. I was myself. My head grew. I was supposed to go... I had and I have two legs. I had to. But I couldn't. Nothing was holding me back — nothing material. But I still... I am lying here and gifting myself to the night. Soon I will leave this place. My body will become a home for other creatures that were born knowing the meaning of their lives."
Simon felt like an abyss stretched between them, so wide and deep that it wasn't possible to build a bridge across. And still, standing on one edge, he could clearly see the other; and then he screamed something from his edge, he could be heard from the other as well.
"I can't go too. I have two legs, but they won't obey me. I have a head, but there is no thoughts, just soot. I have feelings that no one understands, and a brand of an outcast on my forehead. I loved, but no one ever loved me back, as if I was born undeserving. You were sterile and headless, I was in the noise and without my insides. The whole world around me broke apart into dots. I tried to pick them up — they cut my palms. All building crumbled onto me in non-shiny pieces. Matte world crumb. It cut all my body. And all people around. All of them walk around without skin, but I still can't see their feelings. Noise never leaves, even then I sleep. It fills in my thoughts. I close my eyes and see how dots fling from corner to corner. And there is this noise in my head, like thousands of rivers spilled all at once."
Body listened and felt better. Person remembered that everyone has the same problems in childhood. Next to him was lying a little boy, so similar to him once upon a time. There was no better reward than seeing yourself young again. Once more touch youth in its flesh. Imagine that there is still a chance.
"You are still a child, and chaos inside you prevail above everything you have besides it. Chaos is the one who destroys everything around you and prevents you from creation. Chaos is the one who makes you think that you are unloved and undeserving, it's chaos who eclipsed all your insides, so you wouldn't see them and would think that they are empty. Chaos persuaded you into polluting your own body, but, at the end of the day, you did it yourself," Simon felt body's hand tear away from his, and rough cold fingers touched his wrist. "You can overcome anything... And young body doesn't deserve such a treatment."
"But you didn't overcome, did you?"
"No. Sterility, even being opposed to chaos, not deprived of it. And it didn't save me. Now I'm lying here. I'm giving away my life to the nature because I cannot justify and don't deserve it."
Body could tell how worried Simon got. He grew quiet, clenching his hand into a fist, began to breathe slower, more thoughtful. Person thought he scared the kid, and now he'll have to leave alone, depriving himself of enjoyment.
"Inside me... Right under my skin..."
Simon's worry carried over to the person. Person moved, as if he got a second wind. He turned to Simon, so he could see his face. Seeing him made Simon think that he was looking at the most ordinary face in the world. Most people in his dreams had the same exact face. Body had a scar under one of his eyes — painter got distracted by a bird crashing into the window and accidentally drew a wrong line with his brush. He had the thin lips of a dead man and a patchy stubble — hairs didn't have enough strength to grow. Simon liked this mediocrity. No surprises. No nightmares. Only correspondence with expectations. His brain caught the consonance.
Simon put his hand on the body's chest — accidently shaking off lumps of sticky dirt and seeing numbers — four and five.
"Almost the answer to the ultimate question of life and the universe."
Person laughed.
"Chaos made me come here. And it made you come here too. And now we are together."
"I am your suicide note..."
Simon pressed his forehead to body's chest. Looked at his other arm — it was smeared with something red, as if someone spilled carmine paint. Simon listened to infrequent heartbeat of the body, thinking to himself that in this moment his life was leaving him and going straight to the stranger. Air heated up, like his soul was approaching the end, like he was descending to the hot catacombs of hell. And the person didn't seem as cold as before.
"You are lying next to me, and I can't hear nature calling me anymore. Maybe, it changed its mind..."
"So all of this was in vain..."
"In vain. Again."