Inside the skull: a poisonous bug with millions of legs, each made to stab, each altering the oscillations of your brainwaves despite the protections put in place to keep it away, to get it out get it out GET IT OUT GET IT OUT
Those are the echoes in the hallway, you walk down south and walk down to hell and there’s the echo, there’s the echo of the, “GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT.”
The skull is quite large, the beast to which it belongs is human but not quite. The hell you’re walking towards is certainly a hell, but also not quite. You don’t know what you’re doing, do you? Neither do I. Neither does anyone else. The skull has screaming inside it and you can hear it get louder as you walk. Sometimes it gets louder. Is the hallway straight or is it curving at such a slow rate that you can’t tell it’s curving, and does it keep bringing you farther then closer then farther then closer to the skull?
As it turns out it is your own skull, but not quite. Is that getting annoying? The yes-but-no nature of it all? You can leave if you want. It’s your choice. You can turn back. You choose not to so it’s completely your fault. You’re descending, descending, descending. Is it a flat hallway or is it curving? Is it going straight ahead or is it going down? Is it a hallway or a tunnel? Where is it going? Where are you going? Where am I going? You tell me, you’re the one deciding the path.
The screaming does not ever end. Sometimes it grows faint and so you keep walking in the hopes it’ll go away completely. You’re ignoring the doors, by the way. I decided not to mention them before because you didn’t say anything about them but there are doors here, and you’re just ignoring them. Afraid you’ll see the skull in there? Afraid there might be something more complex? Afraid you might be able to actually do something about the screams? GET IT OUT.
Grow a spine. I’ve been in the clutches of the bug before. It’s nothing too bad. You just pluck it out. See, we all have some bugs from time to time, they’re normal. Look at me right now. No. Stop. Stop walking (it’s pointless anyway), look at me. I am opening my skull. The top half of my forehead, you can see the bug crawl out. Many legs, it’s poisonous too, and now look. I take it out, I crush it beneath my foot.
And there you go, now you’re walking again. Too scared to confront the truth, that you could just open a door and do exactly what I did and make the screaming stop. Just crush the bug! Just crush–
Ah. Silent and sulky you are, but you listened. There’s the door. Open, wide open. The scene inside is… a wide wide arena, the skull half-cracked on its side and the bug is… the bug is… but it’s far away? But it’s small and close, but it’s big and far away, it’s throbbing and growing and shrinking and mangling the gray matter that rests inside the skull, and the poison seems to leak out of the skull. The bug’s body is integrated into the brain, the poison made a paste which makes the bug a native of the brain, one with the brain, it’s part of the brain. There’s the screaming but it’s hard to say if it’s from the brain or the spider, if there’s a difference, if it’s just… it’s just screaming. It’s just a skull, and it’s a cage, and there’s just screaming. I don’t know from where.
…
Okay. Okay. Stop looking at me like that. Stop.
Let’s just go back into the hallway. We can walk forever and forget this ever happened.
Let the screams turn into white noise.
This one is from June 2022. I was doing quite a bit of 2nd person writing. I still do it sometimes, but back then the narrators were way more antagonistic. They were also less abstract, as in, they were more like characters which the ‘you’ could interact with. These days I use 2nd person way less, and the narrators are (example: no progress possible).
I also used to do those, “End the piece with a couple single lines, line breaks in between” way more. Makes sense, since the pieces were more like dialogue. It feels a bit try-hard but o well, I was 17, it’s fine, school had me fucked up (evidence: the flash fiction itself).
My newer stuff is more like someone talking to themself, trying to make sense of things. Or trying to explain things to someone else, but it’s really hard to explain, and it’s like you’re trying to explain it yourself by rambling at this other person and they don’t get it and you don’t get it…? Actually, no, sometimes you two DO get it. But there’s the risk of it all seeming like nonsense. You’re taking that risk anyway. So there’s a nervousness to it.
Anyway, my first new writing of the month wasn’t really flash fiction, it was a new format where I showed snippets of work-in-progress stuff and talked about the same. I count it as new writing because of the stuff I wrote as commentary, and also because most of the snippets were from new writing anyway (others were from old incomplete writing, which I must get back to). Title of the post is Where are you supposed to be? Where are you supposed to go?.