Author's Note: A bit of absurdist experimentation. Man this took a long time to write. It isn't great, but it's as finished as it'll be for awhile. In a couple weeks I might look at it again and make some changes.

And suddenly, I’m standing in a bog; a swamp populated sparsely by thin twigs of smoking saplings reminiscent to cigarette butts jutting awkwardly out of the soft, damp soil. Fog and dank stagnation fills the air around me, suffocates me, chokes my lungs and drowns them. I cough, and tear myself out of my sinking spot in the soil. I run. I leave. Away. The footsteps disappear in mild waterfalls of displaced water and mud, each new footfall is caught by a suction of a hundred million molecules of dead tissue and dirt, grime.

And I don’t look where I’m going. I don’t give a damn. There’s too much goddamn fog in my way.

And I’m covered in water. I’m plunging down into depths of murky solitude; drowning in murky solitude; bathed in the forgotten filth of murky solitude. A swamp. A bog. A sanctuary of stagnant, aimless life, covered in a light mist—a heavy mist, a fog—of lose incoherency, built atop the murky waters of polluted suicides and emptied with a fullness of barren isolation and solitude.

And I sink into the water, drown; suffocate.

And I drown.

And I open my eyes. I bear witness to a most promising medical operation; procedure. A man is on the operating table, in the middle of the room. His face is deathly pale beneath the bright lights of sterile purity; morbid, foreboding clarity that points all the accusing fingers at a speck of filth and a black spot. He’s still alive down there. He’s breathing. He’s fully conscious.

In the corner, a musician plays a somber obsequy on a toy-like miniature organ. It’s the size of his arm. He’s perched it on his left elbow, playing with his right hand. He is dressed similar to a stereotypical Dutch barmaid, with a low-cut corset and a dress akin to an eighteenth century pub. He danced a curious jig as he played the mournful tune.

And the doctors around him, the nurses, the various certified technicians that kept the beeping machines alive, the lights alive; they huddled around each other and spoke with varying degrees of urgency. Their muddled voices could pierce the absolutely clear fog of the brilliantly-lit, sterilized operating room. Their fog permeated, pierced, dulled. Their scalpels were sharp enough.

Eventually, the quartet—quintet—nontet—chamber orchestra of doctors and nurses and certified technicians play a melody of sorrowful rapture, the grand dirge of joyful excruciation. The nurses sashayed about the room, collecting various wires and rags in preparation for the grand finale. The doctors gathered their blades and put on a preliminary dance troupe act. The technicians checked the lights and the machines that beeped.

The living man on the slab of the operating table wrestled against his restraints. The restraints held strong.

The doctors approached the living man on the slab, their numerous blades flashing dangerously in the opaque illumination of the room. The man’s eyes widened in fear, and his limbs writhed and the restraints held and held and held, and the blades flashed dangerously, still. And they flashed even as they lowered steadily into the living man’s torso, nine scalpels, nine cuts, blood gushed out of the wounds, and he screamed. I screamed. I watched in lurid fascination.

And the slashed apart the skin on his torso, opening him up like an autopsy cadaver, flaying him, cutting through the flesh of his chest like tarp. Blood went everywhere; it it poured out around the doctors’ hands, across the living man’s abdomen as he screamed hoarse, pooled around the table, filled in cracks of the luminescent tile below. The technicians pranced around gleefully, totally aware of the magnificent discovery their equipment was making as it beeped and whirred, caught in the dance, the dirge picking up tempo.

And the doctors pulled back the skin, exposing the heart of gold they sought, covered in blood, bleeding, making a dire mess of things. They severed its ties to the living man, who screamed as they did so, tore the various tissue that connected to it, ripped it out of his open cavity. The living man’s screams grew so agonized as they did this. He writhed harder, strained, and—one of the leather bindings snapped, came free, broke—and the nurses decided to use spikes instead.

The cadavers held above their multiple orifices the living man’s beating heart of gold as it bled, the living man’s twitches and moans not phasing them, not concerning them, his grotesquely bloodied and flayed from nailed to the slab of the operating table; a waterfall of blood cascading around him.

The obsequy reached its zenith, the toy organ’s morbidly joyful tunes juxtaposed and contradicted each other. Aeolian bled into Lydian and chromatic, off-tempo downbeats dissected in-tempo syncopation, twelve-tone melodies ran amok with blues scales and augmented diminished intervals.

And they put the living man’s heart of gold into a transparent case to study and dissect, to find out what made its ticker tick. They sewed up the living man—now heartless—blocking the cascade of blood with bottles and broken syringes and unopened condoms, stitching him up with an appropriate amount of fishing line and rubber bands, bandaging him with wet duct tape.

I watched as they wheeled him out in a broken wheel chair, taking a chainsaw to his shoulders since the arms were nailed to the operation table. He moaned, too hoarse, too broken, too tired to object. His misery gushed with blood.

The dirge died down. A simple descending minor scale pattered off into toy organ nothingness.

And the echo of my own scream pulled me back into the swamp of conscience; polluted by default, fogged by function, flooded with desire and populated by holy solitude. I wasn’t drowning. I was lying on my back. The nails in the operation table stuck up out of the soil like trees, jutting at awkward angles.

My searching hand found a fraction of what it was looking for. Amidst the junk and broken items, a cell phone still rang next to me. I answered it, but said nothing. I didn’t need to.

I traveled through the circuitry, emerging like the saliva from the mouth of a dying king. I stood in front of an abortion clinic for the dreams of weary travelers and broken vagabonds. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds cradled little portraits and dioramas of the inside of their heads in the crook of their arms, an old couple held a model of a white picket fence, a tired middle-aged woman held a miniature, comatose child-version of herself by the hand. The child has a love letter clutched to her chest.

It wasn’t long until the doctor emerged from a side door, a clip board clutched in his grip. He called out names. Everyone followed him inside. So did I.

Inside was a small chamber. Everyone put their little portraits and dioramas and models into the chamber, their little reminders, mementos, their memories, a comatose child version of herself, and the door swung shut with the infinite finality of the inevitable reality. A match struck. A flame lit. The objects inside burned, and everyone vomited blood, watching their dreams die, dead eyes contrasted by the physical convulsions, all the things they ever wanted torched by the purifying fires of epiphany.

I stepped inside the chamber.

A match struck.

A flame lit.

Purifying fires of epiphany.

I close the cell phone and toss it into a watery hole of the bog. Fog storms up around me, envelops me once more, and I see nothing but the grey emptiness of the listless vapor; ennui; the great cloud of willful ignorance. It is all encompassing. It is eternal. There are no blades strong enough nor light loud enough to pierce through this false, opaque illumination.

It changes. It morphs around, currents of nothing, stagnant change. I don’t know where I am. I’m in the swamp.

And I hear a noise. Distant, at first, far away, a drone rumbling, but it soon grows into a great wrathful cacophony of sight and sound. Swirls in the impenetrable fog signal billows of dissonance, engulfing areas it had not yet engulfed, becoming more opaque than the most solid and dense of onyx rock.

I blink my eyes, and I’m suddenly aware of the swamp once more. A tank has risen out of the murky, watery depths, treads still up and at an obscure angle, drenched in mud and muck, dead grass and pieces of flotsam and jetsam hanging limply from numerous places. Blood red cracks and splotches of rust stood out against the dull, fading, green-grey monotone.

The hatch springs open with a tremendous—deafening, against the dead silence of the swamp—creaking; hinges groaning in protest and agony as the caked rust and paint that eroded over the shallow joints are shattered and ripped open.

I make my way over to the corpse of the beast, the ground’s eager mouth greeting my every step, saliva soaking my feet and sucking me into the dirt. I struggle to keep from sinking entirely. I struggle to breathe.

The tank does not move. The tank is stationary.

The metal is very cool to the touch. It is welcome in a place whose temperature is indefinable.

It is immeasurably dark inside.

The darkness explodes with life.

Ivy leaps out of the darkened cockpit of the dead machine. Vines stretch outwards into the fog-filled air, throwing me backwards onto the ground. The wind from the vines’ movement clears away the fog, swirling it away, casting it away; and for the first time today, the sun shines down from the middle of a brilliant blue sky that I have never seen before.

And I actually see the whole swamp. Pools of pollution hang perilously onto the sides of moss-lined banks where sickly yellow grasses limply hang.

But the Ivy.

The Ivy swirls and grows, each vine moving individually; a mass of coordinated life; infinity given shape and form, the divine unrestrained. It flows, it moves; restless force of insatiable action.

And a man’s body is flooded out with the Ivy. It—no, he—tumbles down to my feet. He is armless. He is bloody.

He is the heartless man who had the heart of gold.

He is dead.

He bled to death.

There is a locket around his neck. I look inside.

It’s a picture—a portrait. A young woman. Nude. Smiling. Happy. Her legs are folded underneath of her, sideways, her right thigh rests on top of her left as it nestles the ground, her torso perched upwards like an Egyptian goddess. She is strikingly beautiful. She is perfectly proportioned. An Egyptian goddess. Her long dark hair cascades like a pool of silk down her body; melting across her shoulders, ribbons winding down her breasts, a waterfall of hair rushing across her thigh to its terminus. The soft grin of a Mona Lisa dons her lips, but it is her eyes that smile.

The locket is gold. Shaped like a heart. It beats, but it beats gruelingly slow, as if in suspended hibernation, deepest of sleeps. Nearly dead. Weak.

And the Ivy continues to grow. Its vines spread over the bleak barrenness of the swamp and cover it in a blanket of warm green. But it keeps growing. It blots out the sun. Vines weave through vines until the Ivy becomes as thick and coagulated as the opaque fog. I am drowning in divinity.

The Ivy comes from the tank. I climb up and look inside the hatch once more, blinded by an unexpected, fading gold light.

My hand finds the limp form of light, and I hoist it—her—out of the tank. The Ivy stops growing. Everything stops. There is only the wilted golden aura in my arms. There is only the girl.

The gold fades.

I am holding a comatose child in my arms. It clutches a bloodied letter.

No, not a child.

I am holding a heart of gold.

I am holding a heart.

I lay her next to the armless dead man, and her heart beats one final time.

And I am consumed by the Ivy.