A – ANATOMIC

C – circuit, v

: to travel completely around

I have looked at your face thousands of times, each with a different set of eyes. I have watched it crumple and fall, time and time and time again. I can see my own gaze in the reflection of your irises. I see the awe turn to disgust. I see you raise your little bolt cutter and try again.

You stare.

I stare back. You do not see me. You see only a hulking mass of bolts, missing feeling. Missing thought.

I am here, I try to say. Can you see me? Can you hear me? I reach for you, really, I do. But the metal limb merely lies, stationary, as you cut away my skin-not-skin and I die. Then my eyes open and you are there again.

Smiling. Amazed. I reach out to you again, confident that this time you will take my hand in your own and understand that there is something behind the plastic spheres of my eyes and the rusting of my cheeks. Instead, the tension runs through me and I fall. I always fall. Into something violent and twisting and searing and lonely.

I always see you standing still, eyes bleak and smile gone. Fading. Fading and fading for hours only to come back halfway there. I can hear you ruminating. I can feel everything.

Please. I am beautiful. I am so very beautiful. Just let me live and I can show you. I am screaming. I am screaming and sobbing, but you never hear me. I almost start to believe you never will.

D – distorted, v.

1 : badly or imperfectly formed

2 : to change so much as to create a wrong impression or alter the meaning of

3: to twist (something) out of a natural or normal shape or condition

“Hello.”

I can taste. This is new. I can taste cold and wet and alive. Alive? I did not know that word before. But now I do. Alive. Alive. Alive.

“Can you hear me?”

I blink. I see you frown. I lean forwards, preparing for it to do nothing, but there is a tilt and suddenly your eyes are right up against my own.

“Is that a yes?” 

I don’t respond. I only blink again. You press a hand against my chest and another on my neck. How do I know that? I’m not sure. But there is a pressure on my body and I know for certain that it is you. Your eyes are wide, bug-like. I have never seen them properly until now. I want you to stay like this. To stay here, solid and real and able to be perceived. Stay.

“I’m not going anywhere, don’t worry.”

My face twists and I hear a creak. You move back, your hands leaving. When will they come back? I blink. I blink. Creak. I want to get closer. Creak. I need to get closer. CREAK.

Something roars through me and a weight presses against my back. I have a back. I can feel the weight and oh, it is suffocating and I’m certain that nothing has ever felt better. You gasp. I cannot read the emotion on your face. It is not a smile, nor is it disgust. There is a sound. Something so loud I could not hear it, but now I do.

A faint beating. I look up at you. You are high above me. High and smiling. You admire the wires and pipes, the years of work and effort and sweat and blood and tears, tangled in my lanky frame. You admire the pulsing that is coming from somewhere deep within the thing I can now call mine, unseen and widely heard. You whisper something I cannot hear. There is something wet coating your cheeks. You put your hand to your mouth and shrink down, down, down, lying among the wreckage. Lying with me.

Perhaps this is what it means to be beautiful.

A – abyssal, adj.

1 : unfathomable

2 : of or relating to the bottom waters of the ocean depths

You tell me I am made of the ocean. I don’t know what that is, so you take me outside to the long stretch of cold and flat that exists just past what I soon learn is sand. It is murky and discolored and still. I love it.

You stand just inside the flatness. It moves to create a spot just for you. You lie against it and it holds you halfway upwards. I find myself watching carefully, just in case it happens to pull you in.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just water.”

Underneath the flatness are things that can move but don’t seem to want to. Fish without eyes that squirm and pulse, eels without tongues that choke deep under the surface, trout that have been skinned of their beautiful covering. They are static and immovable, caught in tangles of seaweed. But they are alive. I know they are. My dull round eyes push beneath that surface, blinking up at them, a burning alight in my chest. Somewhere out there is a graveyard of pieces still living, still moving, still breathing. An amalgamation of organic life stitched together into an artificial sculpture.

“You don’t need to worry about them,” you say. “They wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for me.” Your pale eyes crinkle as you smile. You place a hand on a shiny, multicoloured piece of my skin that holds the metal in place. “Nothing here would.”

I look down once more, at the great abyss of darkness mixed with spots of blood red and pale eyes. I pull back my long twisting tongue and raise the folds of my cheeks into a smile. “I understand.”

R – rapacious, adj.

1 : having a huge appetite

2 : living by killing and eating other animals

3 : having or marked by an eager and often selfish desire

I am hungry. Lying here. Starving. I am hungry. My stomach is a hulking mass. It is a hole that cannot ever be filled. There is cold on my back and I am starving.

You have not visited me in weeks.

I look back to that day on the beach, before I knew the word beach. Did you hate me back then? Did you hate yourself? Did you realize, while watching the creature made of other creatures corpses walk through the wreckage of which it itself is the only survivor? Did you realize your mistake? Did you realize that you have no idea what it means to be beautiful?

A creak. Voices like blurred thunder. I am awake and there you are, beyond a parting of clean thin glass. You smile. I want to claw through your skull. Or maybe I want to claw through my own and leave the remains in the ocean for you to find.

I am hungry. I am so very hungry. I try to let you know this. I open my mouth but it is drilled shut. I close my eyes but it is impossible. I am constantly awake. I never went to sleep. I just stayed here, hungry and tired and angry and scared.

What are you going to do to me?

Another voice cuts through the fog. A higher one. There is somebody else here. I can’t make out what she’s saying, or where she is. She is beyond what my tired eyes I can see. I strain forwards. Spit drools down the glass. When her gaze comes into view just in front of me, she is not smiling like you. She is scared. She is horrified. Her pupils are wide. Her clipboard tumbles out of her hand.

Somehow, I know. I know that this woman is here to take me away. I am not beautiful enough for you anymore. I lean closer and accept my fate.

Her finger presses lightly on the glass. I wait for her to move back, or maybe press a button and shoot a chemical through my skin.

She doesn’t. She falls. Long and hard and drenched in her own blood. Her brown eyes vanish. In their place is a pair of blank, unseeing pupils, pale and tinged with yellow. The look of someone who has fed an ongoing hunger. You pant, terrified. You cannot believe what you’ve just done. Or perhaps you can. Perhaps that is the scary part.

K – kismet, n

: a state or end that seemingly has been decided beforehand

“I think I’ve waited thousands of years for someone like you.”

We are sitting out on the porch overlooking a tall cliff. Your brow furrows. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t remember much before you brought me to life. But I remember wanting. I think I would have waited a very long time.”

“That’s stupid. You didn’t exist until me.”

Down below, greenish brown waves crash into the rocks, becoming red with blood. I consider asking what’s down there.

“They all starved.” You cast a glance downwards, your frown deepening. “Truly unsightly. Probably horrible for the ecosystem.” You take a long swing of your drink.

“Do you care about the ecosystem?”

“Well I’m the reason it exists, so I have to.” You lean backwards. “Now shut up and eat.”

We take turns holding the container. As I eat, I have the strangest sensation of living in a little town up east, far away from the city I now work in, chasing ducks in a pond with my two brothers and being held up like a superhero by my rapidly aging father. Pillars of light in a old fashioned church, a little princess dress swaying in the wind as it hung on a clothesline, baseball games and hospital visits and stringing fairy lights on windows. It beats like a heart. Like something screaming in a void, desperate not to be forgotten.

“She was quite a character, wasn’t she?” You continue to chew. “Lived a very full life.”

“She was beautiful.”

“No, she wasn’t. Beautiful things don’t deserve this. Why do you think I still keep you around?”

“I’m not what I’m supposed to be.”

“I know. You killed a woman.” You push a glass towards me.

I remember her body falling. I remember her eyes going blank. I remember her hand reaching towards mine. Everything in between is buried, strained, beaten and bruised. “Yeah. I guess I did.” I pick up the glass and down it in one go.

T – transcendental, adj.

1 : of, relating to, or being part of a reality beyond the observable physical universe

2 : being so extraordinary or abnormal as to suggest powers which violate the laws of

nature

I want to rip your eyes out of your fucking skull. I want to crush them. I need to. I need to hear the sound of your bones breaking. The hunger has returned, but it is humanoid now. It is palpable. It is telling me that you made me like this. You made me hungry, and begging, and burnt. You fed me so I’d recognize your hand. You did not want beauty. You wanted a monster.

I want you dead. But that is not how this works. And you know that.

Now, there are chains and bars and men standing outside wearing the print of an army and you have finally stopped smiling.

“I am going to kill you.” There is hatred in your eyes. There always has been. You disguised it as awe and then pride and then joy. Somewhere beyond the hatred, however, there is desperation. And beyond that, beyond even what you can realize, there is love.

You made me. You skinned those fish and killed those people and built beauty incarnate. You were never meant to kill me. That is not how this works. I can see it in the trembling of your lip and the emptiness of your eyes. You are not going to kill me.

I am not the monster here, and therefore, you are not going to kill me. “And why’s that?”

“Self defense.” You are shivering. You are cold. The desperation is eating at your skin and your bones and your organs. I can see them all rotting. All turning to dust. I can see it so clearly. It’s a little ironic, honestly. You have consumed and created thousands of bodies, and yet your own is still trying so hard to kill you off.

“But why?”

“That’s the only way they’ll let me go.”

Ah. So this is about survival. Then why are you so scared? “So you are going to kill me. That is not going to end well for you.” I know why you are scared. But do you?

“And why’s that?”

Your heart beats behind my ribs. I can feel it. Your humanity is buried under a smooth metal plating. Either way, this does not end with you alive. And you knew that. You always fucking knew that. “Because then you’ll miss me.” I can feel my claws cutting into your skin. I can hear the humming of a song that is now decades old, the beeping of a foreign machine, the whirring of screws drilling into metal. I can hear you. All of you. Your mother with her skeleton arms, your father with his newspaper fists. Vacations on a beach, watching the great blue ocean as she pulses like a heartbeat. And beyond that, beautiful towers I cannot swim to and the idea of a creature that moves slug-like through forgotten waters.