Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for language and violence.
Warning: Horror, vivid descriptions of gore, and slight cursing
Note: This one's for defyingravity01 because she wrote me a fantastic horror story.
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The Sound of Depression
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Opening the door brings forth a wicked rush of excitement. Whisking up from the darkness is the scent of pungent decay and fear, thicker than the knife handle in my hand. The open door casts down pale light onto the figure that lies hunched at the bottom of the steps, cradling himself, holding himself together.
I would smile if I had a mouth. Seeing him—Genesis—lying on the floor naked, surrounded by pools of blood gone black from rotting, gives me emotion. Genesis is the only one who can ever do that to me. I can’t put a name to anything I feel other than ecstasy, which twinges inside my skull when Genesis turns his head towards me.
I reach the bottom steps. Genesis’s skin glows a sickly white in the dark and droops around the gaping hole in his abdomen. It’s like a thin, blue-webbed blanket, but it’s no protection when I grab him by the arms and haul him up.
He doesn’t make a sound.
I know it hurts him. I know he can feel. He has a nervous system in what’s left of that body of his and can register all the pain that I cause him. Even though I have taken my sweet time tearing him apart from the inside, he doesn’t make a single sound. I want him to whimper, to yell, to do something. But he remains quiet. A white hot sensation flares up inside me, souring the ecstasy.
I get it back when I place Genesis on the meat hooks he has gotten accustomed to. The hooks slide easily into his shoulders, coming out right under his collarbones. I remember the way he would inhale sharply at the pain before I took out his lungs. Now I can’t hear him breathe at all.
Genesis suspends there, his body swishing back and forth for a moment, and I get a look into his gaping chest.
It’s nearly empty.
The organs lay strewn about the floor, lost in the dark. I feel another emotion swelling inside me somewhere, and I don’t like it. I don’t like the fact that, even though I have taken twenty of Genesis’s organs, he hasn’t made a damn sound. All that’s left is an intestine and his heart.
I think what upsets me the most is the fact that our time together is drawing to a close.
I reach in and grab a fleshy-pink intestine. Genesis watches me, his icy eyes following my actions. I want to tell them that this is his entire fault, that if he would just make a sound I wouldn’t have to get my knife and slowly slice off a piece of his intestine.
He squeezes his eyes shut. I want to scream, “TALK, YOU PIECE OF SHIT.” But he’s the one with a human body, the one who is actually alive and able to speak, not me. All I am is depression in physical form.
I slice off another piece. A bit of brownish blood dribbles out from the wound, hardly any due to the fact that I’ve taken out any veins and arteries that may circulate blood to it. Genesis lolls his head back in quiet agony. I get a full view of his trachea, of all the muscles in his throat. If only he would use them.
I yank the intestine, he convulses, and I feel overwhelmed.
I drop the knife. Taking Genesis’s jaw into my hand, I jerk his face towards me. The blue pools of his eyes hold the reflection of a horrid creature. The skin of his face is bruised. There are scars that are deep enough to show jaw muscles and bone, the skin around the wounds black from decaying. I make new ones when I pierce his skin to force him to open his mouth.
I glare at his tongue. I have been sure to keep it and his vocal cords perfectly intact, waiting for him to squeal or sob or tell me, “Please don’t hurt me anymore.”
Understanding of what I’m thinking crosses over Genesis’s face, but he still won’t say anything. I let go of his jaw, let his head snap down, let him try and lift it up as the vertebrae sticking out through his throat and back work with effort. He stares as I snake my hand into his chest cavity and find his heart.
I can’t feel its warmth or its rapid beating, but I can see the way it speeds up in fear. My fingers slide around it, trapping it in my hand. All it will take to end Genesis is ripping this disgusting thing out and throwing it into the dark. I would finally be able to leave this basement and never come back down. Genesis would putrefy here.
I can’t tell if that’s what I want or not.
Before I can wrench the wretched piece of muscle in my hand, I hear a crumpling sound and look up. Genesis is staring at me, his arm outstretched and hand resting somewhere on my head; I can’t feel where. I look down. With my cloak on the floor, I’m completely exposed.
I am nothing more than bones. A skeleton. I’m genderless. I can’t feel. I don’t know the names of emotions, but I have a lot of them. I am emotion.
There’s the crisp sound of chapped lips parting, followed by a hushed, “That’s better.”
I reach up and find Genesis’s hand cradling my face, the sound of depression ebbing away as the soft resonance of his voice echoes in my skull. And as I reached up and touched Genesis’s hair, getting long strands of blonde caught in my finger joints, I realize that I need Genesis desperately. He is the definition of new beginning. He is the start, birth, hope, love.
I’m the expiration of life, decomposition, blackness, misery.
I don’t want to feel this way anymore.
I take Genesis’s arms, easing him off the hooks. He can’t hold himself up; his spine sickeningly cracks and the top of his torso bends back. I react too late; his skin stretches, breaks, then separates. I drop the lower half of his body in attempt to catch the top, but there's a thud as he hits the ground face first. I gently turn him over; his face is covered in blood and there's a tooth on the floor, long roots stained a bright red.
I fervently swivel my head around. I spot Genesis's kidney a couple feet away and snatch it up. I place it in Genesis's gaping hole of a chest before starting to quickly pick up every organ and intestine I can find. Placing everything haphazardly in Genesis's chest I feel the need to nurse my new beginning back to health. But there's no way I'll be able to wash away the scars on him or take back what I've done.
Genesis watches me. He tries to raise his arm, fingers twitching as they try to catch hold of my radius. I stop and let them.
He swallows, coughs blood onto my bones, then shakes his head. I shake mine back in return, wanting to say, "I fucking need you, Goddamn it."
But my thoughts cannot be voiced. Unlike me Genesis is able to say, "Cannot be fixed."
His voice is soft and liquid, thinner than blood but thick enough to choke me. Depression is all I am and I need to hear Genesis's words of hope and love and life. I want to hear laughter. I long for a smile, even if it's full of blood and missing teeth.
I cradle Genesis. With one hand behind his head and the other around his lacerated body I pick him up. Some of his organs fall, an intestine dangles down and drags through the grime. I hold him closer.
I reach the bottom step of the stairs. I climb up out of the abyss with the sound of hope still booming in my skull.
Points:
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Canary word: Present
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125,010 Literary Works • 672,839 Reviews
Oh my gosh, I wish you would've commented on my wall. I'm so sorry I didn't get to read this until now. This is amazing! It's wonderful! It's perfection. But it's not fair.
Damn you, going and writing a story for me that's so much better than mine.
Just kidding, I love this anyway
I love the symbolism with the narrator and depression. I love the symbolism overall. To me, Genesis represented the beginning. The narrator is literally ripping him apart. So the emotions and depression is just ripping this person in half. I love that you included the emotional aspects while including gore and horror (I loved that part a LOT). It's the PERFECT story. I love your work.
Bye, Kev
I knew you would find this eventually! I had tagged you in a comment but I don't think it worked properly. And your writing is equally as good! Don't sell yourself cheap.
You're right about Genesis being a new beginning and basically symbolizing life while the narrator was depression and the awful things the world can do to a person. Everything the narrator did was what depression and hurt feels like. The narrator didn't like being what he was or doing the things he did but he wanted to be told he didn't have to live the way he did anymore. But this story can have so many interpretations depending on who's reading. It's why I wrote it vaguely.
Hey Kev!
I decided I just had to read something of yours, even if it's horror which ugh, is not really my type of thing. But the way you wrote it? It's enough to convert me into a horror reading person. Because this was just fantastic!
You've did a very good job with the opening. On it's own it's enough to draw me into the story with just the pure horror described at the beginning! And this horror is continued all the way through until the turn around in the story. Trust me, it was good enough to give me goosebumps. And what I especially love about this story is it's not there just to demonstrate the emotion of horror through a story, but it also tells it's own too. Through a beautiful use of description. Depending on the reader, I saw it as Genesis being depressed and mentally doing all of this to himself, enduring it, until he realised he needs fixing. And he still falls as he desperately fixes himself before deciding he's too broken. But somehow, he still has hope. It was a beautiful, beautiful story.
What could be improved? Well this is a difficult question ;.; Nothing? I would only back up what DarkRaven already said with the organ symbolism. It would be nice to know what the intestines represented since they were for some reason the last organ left other than the heart. If there was a reason to it, it would've be a nice addition to the short story.
Other than that, keep that pen in hand! You write wonderful things with it. You must definitely tell me whatever you post next
Deanie x
Hi. I've read through your work and I've enjoyed it quite a bit. I am The Raven and I will be reviewing your work for the moment. My review will be divided between The Good and What Needs Improvement/Suggestions. Now, let's get down to business...
The Good:
1) One thing that struck me the most is the way you layered your work with meaning such that it could be interpreted in multiple ways. Forlorn hope? Sure, why not. An exploration of the human condition? That works too. Our need for belief and religion? Okay, that might work. Or how about how religion is transformed, serving a different function? How about death, humanised? The human views of death? Those are cool too. It's amazing how much I could read into this. You remind me of Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway.
2) I'm a veteran fan of horror. I've gone through a lifetime of horror films and stories. I watched The Thing as a young kid. That's a decade and a half of horror, I believe, and for as long as I could remember I anticipate feeling terror as a way to build myself, to build character - to smile or at least stare down terror with a straight face to me, is happiness.
The fact that you've ellicited a bit of fear in me for a few seconds somewhere in the first half of the story with nothing but words, unlike the millions of dollars pumped into those horror films, says something about your writing skill. You're just a few steps behind Stephen King.
Not to mention, you mixed in horror with something intellectual as mentioned above - that, to me, is important for the horror genre, as playing with both the emotions and thoughts of a person will ensure that your work's longevity is increased. Emotions feed into thoughts and thoughts into emotions, and if your work stimulates both strongly and equally well, boy do you have an experience to give.
What Needs Improvement/Suggestions:
1) More of a suggestion, but I highly recommend going a bit deeper with the symbolism. What does each organ mean? What does each gesture mean? I know that there might be something there, but if not, here's a chance, and even if you've already embedded something, why not more? And why not nudge your readers gently in the right direction? Without telling but instead by showing?
2) Speaking of showing rather than telling, there are some points where you were lapsing into telling your readers. For example, as mentioned in the previous review, the emotions. Then there's a bit such as this:
I'd like it better if you'd say it slant. Let it occur to me that Genesis are those, and the narrator are those.
Other than that, I have nothing left. This piece is very well done, very thoughtful. There's alot to like about this piece, and very little to not like about it, if my review is any indication. Well done!
Thank so much! This is an extremely well done review. It really made my day. I understand that was scraping the surface with symbolism, only because the whole piece can symbolize so many things depending on who's reading it. Thank you again for reviewing! Maybe we can talk about horror films some time.
No problem, I'm glad I can help.
I am a big fan of intricate horror, so I officially love you, by the way.
I am all about some awesomely awesome description and transformational characters, so this fits the bill.
I love how you describe the emotions, first of all. It's not dull or bland, but it's also not too flowery. Especially your opening line. Caught me off guard, grabbed my attention and made me finish it(Not that I was going to put it down anyway.) And, now that I'm looking back at it to review it, I understand that, when you say 'holding himself together,' there is nothing figurative about it.
But, when you say, "I would smile if I had a mouth," I feel like you could elaborate a little on that. You get your point across just fine: your character has no mouth at all. But I was under the impression that your character was, in fact, nothing. Just a black mass. Not a skeleton. So maybe you could say something like: "My teeth would be bared in a horrible grin if I had lips to stretch over them." Just a suggestion.
You say somewhere(I can't pinpoint where exactly) "He has a nervous system in what's left of that body of his." I really like what you did, but the only two solid emotions I can name through most of it are ecstasy and anger. I feel like this character would be bitter about their obvious lack of external connection. If you intended for some of it to come across as bitter, the point is lost. In that place, and in others(If I find them, I'll try to point them out), you could add a phrase that lends itself to bitterness without the character saying outright, "I am bitter about this-and-such." Or maybe not even a phrase. In the instance I brought up, you could just italicize the word 'he'. Or create vindictive pleasure. Example: "He has a nervous system in what's left of that mangled thing I call his body."
The place where you say, "I yank on his intestine..." What is your character overwhelmed by? I can't tell whether it's insane happiness or an odd sort of remorse.
One small grammar thing so far: "...the skin around the wounds black from decaying." It would be decay, not decaying.
And, a paragraph or so later, petrify versus putrefy. I think you meant to turn to stone, right?
The line where you say, "I don't want to feel this way anymore." Maybe you could italicize 'want,' then add something saying that the character needs Genesis. Like, directly after it, because I know you say it later.
One last nitpicky thing: You say, "Unlike me Genesis is able..." Comma right after me.
Again, I loved your piece. I think it's really cool. Half literal, half metaphor. Thanks for posting for everybody to read it.
~Caeai
Thank you so much for this wonderful review. I'll go back and fix those grammatical mistakes and take a look at the sentences you pointed out to see what I can do to make the better. Thank you again, this review means a lot!
Now that my review is over with, I can spend time fangirling! I loved the strange melancholy with the undertone of rather perverse hope. You definitely brought what you wanted to life without overdoing it. Again, thanks for posting it!
You're so kind! I realized how the meaning of the story and some of it's details may not come across to some readers, but I'm so glad you understood. This comment really made my day!
Really interesting. I don't know if I completely misunderstood something, but this made me think. For unless this was some kind of a "picture" of something emotional, there is no way this makes any sense to me. Bravo. Thanks for the great job, I'd loved reading it
Haha thank you for the comment. The piece was meant to be a visual representation of depression and hope. A literal representation. Thank you so much for reading.