A Sorry Sight

Moribund beasts. I am enthralled by their behaviour. They must be scrutinized to the finest detail, for this will add to the seriousness of my analysis. But I must first address a deeply pressing question that, if ignored, might bring unfortunate ambiguity to this work. I, by no means, belong to this collective of beasts. It is that reason why their behaviour appall me.

The beasts seem to slaughter themselves. If fact, it is mandatory for them to slaughter themselves. When asked why they do slaughter themselves, they mumble protests against their self-inflicted pain. Upon further observation I was able to derive the source of most of this pain. The beasts appear to stay alive on a maximum of four hours of sleep per night. Any more and they will no longer thrive. Hence, they must go on slaughtering themselves.

Sleep

Through their conversations I’ve overhead their primary goal in their self slaughter, and that is to sleep intermittently throughout the day. This way, they’ll have the illusion of always being awake, as a block of sleep must last no more than twenty minutes. Logically, they have an excess in the hours that they are conscious. This excessive time is discarded through the most efficient methods, some with such ingenuity that even the beasts can’t explain how they’ve discarded their hours. The hours are thrown away like careless trifles. After which, the beasts cry in search for this lost time. This searching process takes even more time. This is the true ingenuity of their system. More time lost equals more time searching equals more time lost. To the readers who question why they continue to lose time and continue to cry, the answer is evident. It adheres to their cardinal principle of slaughtering themselves.

But I have observed a flaw in their system. Their slices of sleep come spontaneously. Say a beast was in a classroom. In the last minute of class, he suddenly collapses and purposefully dives forehead first into the table. Remember self-slaughter. But, he must leave for another classroom at the bell! It seems that the beasts have solved this dilemma too. They are able to drag their wasted corpses around the hallways, guide themselves with collisions into walls and with each other, and arrive at the proper classroom. Here, their bruised heads again smash the table and on their sleep they continue. It is by this process that a frenetic scene can be seen in between classes. Their dazed eyes dangle loose in their sockets, aiming aimlessly. Corpses roam about the halls, mangled in a heap of flaccid flesh. Their heads bobble about and resemble much like bobble-heads.

This spontaneous sleep is most unfortunate in times of sexual intercourse. In the heat of the moment, this unfortunate reality can cause the man to collapse completely on top of the woman. If the man is under the woman, there arises a problem too—all his muscles relax. After he wakes, however, he is in a state of stupor. Consequently, the beasts keep their nightstands stocked with cases of Viagra and can be seen scarfing them down by the dozen after their sleep. A most unfortunate case happened when two lovers were making a raucous on their balcony. Then by a stroke of fate, the man spontaneously fell asleep. His hip managed to thrust the woman from behind and both went over the railing. Two naked lovers glided through the still air with the woman screaming in terror. What resulted were their skins, glistening with the oil of their fat turned inside out. The woman’s eyes were replaced with the man’s testicles. Her callipygean buttocks detached and became the man’s two cheeks. Two weeks later, as no one bothered to clear the scene, it was replaced by a frothing mountain of green mold.

Objects

Every year they have a competition. The name of this competition is not known but they do win a prize. The objective is simple: to carry as many objects as possible. As the nature of these objects are not specified, they vary a great deal. Some include the tips of toothpicks, oddly shaped pieces of plastic, and blood-stained floss. I have witnessed beasts hunched over, backs breaking, lungs collapsing, in search for more objects. All the beasts do this. Those who do not compete are dead. And they died from causes such as spine snaps, back breaks, and, most unfortunate of all, beasts who were crushed by cars as they could not afford to look left or right. The reader may have posed the following question: what might happen if they fall under sleep’s spell during object transport? Aside from the obvious, that their items will crush them to death, nearby beasts immediately loot the objects of the deceased. It is from the encounter of one of these events from which I saw something utterly grotesque.

The looting beasts not only take every piece of the objects, but they also take every piece of the corpse. If the objects were adequately heavy, the torso of the corpse may already be split open. Though the scene I witnessed that Sunday was far more revolting. One looter discovered that in the rectal cavity of the deceased, there were some more objects. He then began to slide his forearm through the intestinal tubes and discovered even more objects. Bystanders took note of this activity and proceeded toward the looter. Seeing this, the looter frantically began to remove his pants and placed the objects from the deceased’s rectum into his own rectum. The bystanders, shocked at the looter’s strategy, devised a strategy of their own. Instead of the rear end, the did so through the front end. The rest I shall leave the readers to their imagination. But I must emphasize that the objects were mixed with some substance.

The winner of the competition gets the privilege to go somewhere far away. The exact destination is not own but it is supposedly really really good. Some beasts call it, “A place where it’s actually really really good.” But of course for there to be a winner, there must be losers. At this year’s award ceremony, two thousand beasts died suddenly due to colon rupture. One thousand died from bereavement after they burned their objects. And all the rest kept on living their moribund lives.

Tomorrow

One night I overhead a beast reciting Shakespeare. It was the Tomorrow soliloquy in Macbeth. Though instead of ‘tomorrow’, the beast used ‘yesterday’. When I inquired why he would make such a change, he said that he dreads the future, to which I replied, “What if you go back too far? Before you were born?” After some thought, he replied, “Ah, I’ve got it! I’ll alternate between the two. Today I will do tomorrow. Tomorrow I will do yesterday.” And for three years I watched the beast follow this pattern. All was well until the day his right leg tripped over his left leg and died.

To rid my mind of such devastating images, I went to the imaginary beach in my head. A voice told me to breath in as the water laps forth, and out as it recedes. Instead, the lake water started to become turbulent and came to an unsettling boil. The pale golden sand turned into soot; dark, black sand. Holes popped out, red slime slithered through, their furor spewed and splashed on my legs. Though I felt no heat. I thought I slowly sank through the black sand, but as I looked down, the empty eyes of the void beckoned me. I was falling, falling into the interminable abyss. I looked up to the sky that was a still fabric of turquoise and saw birds, dropping to their deaths.

And there you have it. I had wished to describe some other habits of theirs but found them not as important in a proper description of the beasts. But the tragic truth is, these bestial qualities that I have described above, I see all around me. This disease plagues us to be barbaric, not only to others but to ourselves. Sleep is merely one symptom of this disease. It has the power to make our free will nothing but an illusion, that we meet tomorrow with the same disease untreated from yesterday. In our hour upon the stage, think of what really matters. Since, in the end, we are matter that comes and goes and is heard no more.