I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
It crawls, it crawls, it crawls.
Around him, like pressure – like he has sunk underground, deep into some ancient seabed – but especially inside him. Whatever it - it - is that has changed in him, rewritten him. He has been rewritten so many times before, erased and inscribed, but this is stronger. This sinks into his marrow, his veins, his damn molars.
Time doesn’t matter. It has long ceased to matter, Sleaze encapsulated in his own particular immortality. Days crawl and then speed past, he with little awareness of them. He sleeps, when he can. He dreams of many different worlds. He does not know which ones are real and which aren’t.
One of the worlds is a beach. Two children, playing, and then death, coming swift – a foolish accident – and their parents, their kinfolk, demanding answers. Sleaze had given them himself – given them a monster – and then he wakes.
He remembers how one of the children had had strange eyes, strange scales. A thing that belong in the ocean as well as it had in it, though of course this hadn’t saved it, in the end.
He is awake, now, in this world, this meadow. It is real – he thinks. His skin itches with whatever writhes inside him.
He sees her, the limping gait catching his eye as something discordant among the smooth strides of the rest.
She looks, he thinks, like that child. The same strange eyes.
Did he make her? Did she walk out of his dream?
But she is not that child. She doesn’t look like anyone in the mob, either. She has an eerie quality to her, mist shaped into being.
Or, a dream shaped into being.
“Are you real?” he asks.
He isn’t quite sure how he wants her to answer.
Sleaze
