NOVEL WEB Dead bird friend
I dreamed (or perhaps it was true) that I saw a dead bird lying on the ground on my way back home. The gravel crunched under my bare feet, bleeding. I went over to the bird and picked it up. The bird lay there on the ground, bleeding. I opened its beak wide open.
The dead bird spoke (stranger things have happened): “I am everyone you have ever known. I am them because I went to each one of them and pecked off little bits of their skin. Some of them have survived worse and simply found it a plain and simple annoyance. Some of them experienced true pain for the first time in their lives. Some of them newly learned what it is like to have a piece of yourself taken away, and some of these people were newborn while others had simply been shielded by numerous structures (of power, invisible) and so were too well-protected. Until I came. You probably don’t properly remember most of these people, though each touched you in one way or the other. And some you are aware are alive in your bloodstream forever, they turned to the rain you love so much and sneaked into your pores and embedded themselves deep within, whether for better or for worse.”
The bird’s mouth started flooding and there were no colours as well as infinite colours, a flash of light which felt apathetic and a darkness in which the particles could be seen/detected/joined-in-my-flesh-and-bone (? meaning the particles are just in the air but they are me and I am them and the air is me and I am air and the world is me and I am the world and–), the bird’s beak started to slip off of its head as the flesh rotted. Only the universe remained, flowing out in a dribble.
“I’m a dead bird. I’m also your only friend.” The bird has a tongue and a larynx. It has these because the matter in the universe can be interpreted to have been a tongue and a larynx and a mouth at some or the other points in time and space, all the matter has been in other collections of matter, they’ve all intermingled and they’ve all been one thing or another. “I’m your only friend,” says the god(or greater)-mouthed bird, “and you are correct that all is everything and nothing and–”
“Say something isn’t insanity, please.”
“No. The world is everything and so are you and so am I, if these facts are insanity then so is the whole world and so are you and so am I and so nothing I say and nothing you hear can be sane, and I am you and you are me anyhow.”
“You’re my friend?”
“And you are mine. And the–” The bird coughs. There are galaxies on my face and my face has many allergic reactions to whatever flits about in those places, those worlds. It doesn’t matter though. “I’m dead and alive and neither and both, but what matters/doesn’t is that it’s all–” The bird coughs and hacks and squawks and coughs. Its larynx falls out. It is gorgeous, gorgeous like someone I know who is somewhere in the dribble. Both the larynx and the ‘someone’ make odd noises which I don’t understand but which I like anyway.
“You’re dead and alive, neither, both, so do you just mean it doesn’t matter?”
The beak falls off as the bird’s body putrefies in my hands, bit by bit by scrap by scrap. “Yes and no.”
“What does that even MEAN?!”
“The universe has already ended, give up. But it also has not yet ended, nothing is pre-determined yet is also maybe is, no one knows.”
“WHAT does that– I repeat myself! What does that even–”
The beak scalds my arms, freezes them too. Everyone I know and have ever known and will ever know. Everything, too. All flows down. All seeps through my pores. The beak smiles at me as it throws up its contents into my nerves and bones. The beak then falls down to the ground and dissolves. Grinning, grinning, even in its absence.
I wake up after that. Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know what it means to sleep or wake anymore. I don’t know anything, I know everything, and my mind is…
Watch the grinning, grinning, the end and beginning of the universe, grinning. It is in the light and it is in the darkness. It makes no sense and it makes perfect sense.