"Flayed; Displayed" by R. M. Bundridge

Flayed; Displayed

by R. M. Bundridge

Pat Burrows woke up in dying grass, a memory prodding the folds of his brain; the displacement of sheets and blankets from being in love; a vein pulsing beneath the breakable skin of the temple, from being in love. He clenched a section of grass. It ripped from the ground like hair from a scalp. He woke up with a full view of the endless sky and a lack of breath. Was he beneath the sky? Or in it? The thought of the stars falling on him came against the realization of something resting against his uvula; the object grazed his teeth just so, and he felt ridges along the surface, like gooseflesh had been forced into his mouth. An image appeared in his mind of whatever was inching further down his throat nesting there, keeping the air for itself.

Pat panicked and sputtered into the grass. Coarse and thick brushed past his teeth; he thought of sandpaper whittling them down to nubs and gum. A tongue slipped into his vision, black in the night and ripped from the root; strings of tissue caught between his teeth like popcorn kernels. Pat peeled his lips away from the dangling muscle and let out a long start to a cry.

“Awe, how romantic.” The voice, water caught in an eardrum, a lodged substance unfreeable no matter how vigorously you shook your head, echoed so close to his skull it made him rub his ear to his shoulder. The voice came again, solidifying the thought. “You two must really have finished each other’s sentences.”

A slingshot snapped in his mind, and he locked onto the tongue on the ground, the gritty feeling he’d felt: the piercing in the center. Ed. On either side of the tongue, he saw his hands. Every finger, drenched in a thick black that traveled over and up to his elbows, had pieces of skin beneath the nails.

Sheer panic pitched his insides around like a group of boys to a lesser than classmate. Across the grass, his living room window sat shattered and spattered with blood. In its open wound, Pat bore witness to his first ever crucifixion. Nailed through the palms and tops of his feet, Ed rested his head on his torso. The light from their living room gave him the appearance of a god amongst its people, committing an act so selfless no other being in history would be able to compare.

Ed had been degloved down to his waist, and a sick whisper at the back of Pat’s mind asked how he had liked the feeling of seeing what it was he feared: the inside.

Patches of the hanging skin and intact legs held Ed’s tattoos. The memory of them seemed to coalesce in Pat’s fingertips, the nights he spent trailing the stories of each one, asking questions just to know because that’s how we stay alive.

Pat Burrows screamed at the crucifixion of Ed Willen in their living room window. A jerk of his head, the push onto his two feet, broke the tongue’s tissue but didn’t dislodge the bit from between his molars. If he tongued it—the bile rose in his throat at the unformed thought.

A door opened across the street, and Mrs. Lancaster stepped onto her porch with a scream of her own. The curlers in her hair practically fell out. Her dress whipped around her feet as she fainted. Mr. Lancaster stepped out in the nude and wagged his finger at Pat before looking at the display behind him.

“You poor, poor thing. How you loved him so. If you had loved him any harder... What state might he be in?”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Louder. Playful. Thick, as if weaving.

Tears streaked through grime as years burst in his brain like a firework display; as first date turned to tenth; as confessions and backstories collected in their breaths; as their first home became a sanctuary not far enough away from Pat’s belief that just maybe he was unlovable.

“Why don’t you hug him? Let him down? Show him your heart. Better yet, have him show you his.”

Water dislodged in Pat’s head. What happened next could be described as drowning. The whole world went away to a dark only found in the countryside, where bluffs swelled with waves like burst cysts.

He came to with a heart held high in his hands, head bent low to the ground, and an audience. Neighbors had gathered in their yard. From young to old and older, captured by the display of worship he found himself incapable of breaking out of.

“Let me go!” The demand did nothing. Changed nothing.

“Oh, but you love him, and you fear yourself, and you love the fear that exists within you, which is me. And how do I adore it all as unabashedly as I have; fear existed before permission. Tell me, I beg you, please, enlighten; amuse; even toy with me as I have you, Mr. Burrows, ponder the idea that fear is only as strong as one allows for it to be, so how have we gotten this far? Why is it that I have so, so much control over you?”

Murmurs reached him from the crowd. Next, from his hands as the stillness of the heart was interrupted by badump...badump...badump...

Pat smelled the unspooling of his bladder.

“Why?”

“You have played with your food for far too long, and I noticed.”

A brush of hair flitted past his ear, and he needed it to be wind, but the spider that traveled down his arm and onto Ed’s heart—it stopped there, turned around, looked to the crowd with a tilt of its tiny body—then settled its unblinking eyes on him.

“Why did you take him!”

“I am of nature, Mr. Burrows. A vulture, you might say. I pick off what is left for me.”