It still feels like I'm flying.

















All the colors folded in upon themselves, growing sharper and sharper points until their sight sliced me to shreds. I know how this started, but I have no idea what it is now, or where it’s going. A feminine voice was telling me to relax, but now it’s just a slow, demonic static sound.

















Knives. Slicing. Cutting. Two inches apart. Two feet. Two yards. Two planets. Cut, cut, cut. Slice, slice, slice. Flayed bits of my skin lay splattered across the ground. Others float. Others have dug their way to the center of the earth.

















I thought it was just a piece of candy. I thought the restraints were for sex. I thought a lot of things.

















A floating bone swims by on the crimson river. Is it mine? Where did it come from? It feels like I’m being torn to pieces all over. Touch, the hardest sense to trick, the usual indicator, has abandoned me.

















There are four of them now, standing around me. I can’t process how many hands they each have, but each hand grips a utensil made for cutting, for slicing. The ends of the tools are dancing through the beginnings of me. They’re why pink ribbons peel from my ends. They’re why the burgundy fountain runs pure over the Idol. Cascades, waterfalls. Shedding my peel. Shedding the shell. Molting. A chunk running from my elbow to my wrist is swiftly removed. It falls and the puddle splashes.

















I can’t stop giggling. It looks like a fish falling out of a tank and landing with a splat. I can see the bone in my arm now, split into several directions, twisting and burning and forming a star symbol. It’s a symbol I’ve seen before, but I don’t remember what it means. Who knows if it’s actually there or if it’s just whatever I’m on kicking in?

















The giggling accelerates to cackling. I watch my lungs bounce with each rise and fall of my diaphragm, sticking through the makeshift flaps in my chest like a tissue peeking out from the top of its cardboard box slash dispenser. It’s hilarious. I wonder if I breathe in enough, if they’ll pop like a balloon? I want desperately to try, but I can’t stop laughing to do it.

















Venomous baby serpents climb my flayed legs, plaid and spiral patterns carved in them, following the gaping wounds like slot cars on a track. Forceps tear my urethra open as a particularly small one climbs inside. This pain is extreme enough that I can distinguish it, but in my heightened sense of awareness, the sound is what strikes me. A sound like paper tearing, and then one like a caterpillar eating through a leaf. It comes out of one of my eye sockets and becomes a knife, falling to the floor and floating away. Floating, floating, floating, gently down the red river, past the Idol, past the cutters, past the planets.

















Everything spins gently. I realize I’m not on the floor but the ceiling. We all are. There never was a floor. We’re all flying in reverse. The atoms between our feet and the ground never fully touch. It’s invisible flight. We are all levitators. Only the blood can caress the intricate grooves of the mahogany floorboards. It is a privilege for our parts, not our sum.

















I’m finally able to crawl out. Wrists are snapped twigs, hands caught in the snags of metal cuffs but arms now free to flounder and spurt. Skin, bones, flesh split and hiss and bubble and ooze as I fall with a splat. I’m able to feel the grooves myself, now. I sink into them, tasting the red, swimming in it. I never knew a color could feel so good. So pure. I drink it and it becomes me. I glance into the reflection, and the room is empty.

































I was the Idol all along.