Destadinae

“ Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say,” said a boy who was almost nobody. Not because his name was short, he struggled to condense infinity into a sound imaginable enough to unravel.

“What if the mouth of a dying solar system opens up to you?!" He socratically mocked while gesturing humorously to a sky of blinking gods.

Convinced the stellate audience did more than smile down, he kissed the back of a stolen cigarette for answers. If only flashes of Kadagos generals hadn't interrupted, but La knew they'd paint his teeth with the insides of their fists if they saw how often he pilfered souvenirs from blustery soldiers.

Evenings before, a restored jewel glinted with nostalgia. It was buried inside an early 2000s walkman that he pocketed in a mistake destined for only him. Soul sawed in half, the boy swayed to his prematurely ending childhood. The other part of himself snapped out of it upon realizing his mother's playlist singing when he recognized the voice of his hypnotist.

But for him, lies were a poisonous sap seething out the heart of his mouth. And he only bit himself, no amount of pantomime could change the fact that everyone knew his favorite song was retribution.

"Go to hell!" He growled days earlier at FRB's second in command.

"You first!!" Dreas snapped back with a vengeance.

But when they finally got there, none of them meant a word they'd said. Maybe Dreas did, but now he can't regret it. And all La could take back was a strange marble levitating through the air, its eccentricity filled his pocket with questions. One echoed, "How does a black pearl stay afloat without a surrounding ocean?" The truth is, the boy was too traumatized to ask.

From stumbling out of a mine to tripping over a CD player. He stoops to grab it, but reddened palms stun his eyes mid-scoop. Before the walkman can meet the marble in his pocket, he smears red guilt all over his sleeve.

Reality would've suffocated him if it weren't for the jut of an old oil barrel. The stained fabric comes off as he digs for his lighter while walking toward the rusty can.

Minutes later, the red-tye-dyed top chars to soot within the embers. One last birthday gift from his father reduced to fuel in the Aristada blaze. The sacrificial hoodie was the last reminder of a ten-year-old's wasteful wishes. With his last drop of hope dried, Andreas's cobalt grave would reignite the feud.

Abidemi was at the core of the boiling conflict. Lazaro called her Abbi until she hissed on his friend’s name. The harpy grew less congenial with every praise of Dreas’s savagery. She screeched on about how he must've memorized a devil's sermon to burn a hole in Isha's mind she can't forget.

 "Why were they fighting?" La questioned.

Abidemi shrugged, but some wore masks more real than their faces. Three days later, Abbi told Uji about the last time she saw Andreas. He heard La's name, and old Ares couldn't help but smile from Olympus.

When Uji found him, the fissions separating and meeting up in his mind lit a nuclear explosion. He went to war, immediately slapping Dreas's walkman out of La's grasp before Ms. Hill could yell her fifth "Rebel!"

The startled youth must've only heard sweet things when he had sugar-glass for a face. Either Uji shattered it, or the buzz in La's left pocket jogged a hazy scene from when he was his aggressor's age.

_____

A chill soothed the fingers clasping their mother’s hand. It was the sensation of ethical Canadian rose-cut diamonds set in gold leaflets. Pleroma was a pediatric neurosurgeon married to a dogged independent media journalist. As he wrapped things up with his studio's travel staff, his decorated war vet brother warned of his fatal flaw.

"Terry cares too much, Roma." Uncle J mutters to his sister-in-law before turning to La.

"Boy, do you have your mother's eyes! " He declares while fist-bumping his nephew jovially.

The child’s eyes glow sunnier as his uncle shoves his rugged hand into the boy's grey peacoat, then back into his Military Issue M-65 field jacket. La anticipated a chocolate bar that never came. To his disappointment, something thin and unedible waited inside the lad's pocket instead.

Meanwhile, a pet fee completes a three round-trip ticket transaction. It’s headed for the Ivory Coast, marking Jacob's proposal half passed too late. By then, the most convincing sound from Uncle J was his haggard cough.

Terry walks onto the sidewalk, holding out a handkerchief.

"You good?”

"Just old burn pits finishing me off, finally!" Jacob sarcastically jokes while grabbing the spotted cloth.

" Keep it," Terry responds, rejecting the returned gift.

Uncle J chuckles and continues unconvincingly, "Seriously, Tear...yall shouldn't leave.”

Terry walks near his wife as she tickles their son.

"Come on, J... Child labor in the Congo?

"I know, Tear. You've been drilling that for months. Just thought we'd....."

Before Jacob could finish, Terry reassuringly grabs his brother's shoulders.

" Shit, I'm just trying to be like you, bro. Let me be great."

"Oh, so you trying to be a hero, huh?" Jacob replies just before Pleroma scolds Terry half-sternly.

"Language, boys," She says while covering La's ears.

Terry hushes Jacob, hiding a mischievous grin behind a tatted left forefinger. His lips pressed to two bold red letters, a capital O and F that make up the second to last word in the famous phrase.

"I didn't say it, you rat!" Uncle J responds playfully.

The two burst out laughing, each recognizing the crazy kid cosplaying in their mom and dad's clothing.

As soon as Terry can make a cartoonishly goofy face at his son, Pleroma elbows him.

"Oww!"

"That's where he gets that shit from," she quips.

"Ooooohhh mommy, you said... " La teases imitatively.

"Oh hush, boy!" Pleroma snaps before planting two lips on his soft forehead.

Then, the four walk into La Tera Vista Cafe, ready to munch the papas rellanas and pastelitos they loved too much.

___

Anti-Mars Press staff covered room and board for Terry and his family. La even had his own room in that modern Lualaba Province apartment. But a month hadn't passed into yesteryear before Ms. Jessa Mclane's fate-changing call.

"Terry, this is Jessa. Jacob's attorney," she began.

"Hey, Jess! Haven't heard from you in years!"

"I'm sorry, Terry," Jessa continued.

"Sorry?" Terry asked.

"Your brother...just passed." She replied with all she had to feign composure.

"What!? Wait!"

 Jessa explains, "Last night around 11. Ceselina was sure he'd make it."

"We just talked last wee.." Terry drops the phone and places his hands over his ears. His breaths could be heard shortening, then he let out a wail so unnerving Jessa's head sank on the other end of the call.

" Terry, are you there? ....Terry?"

Rattling, La's dad picks up the phone.

"He left you the house, paid in full. All $759,522 of it," Jessa continued, hoping to say something to console her client's bewildered sibling.

"You just have to come by and sign off."

Sounding defeated, Terry responds, "Okay, Jess. Where's Ceselina gon..."

She reassures him, "Jacob left her 1.7. She's going to her cousin's in Tampa."

Terry's voice cracks. " We thought we had more time."

"What's wrong, baby!" Pleroma rushes over, noticing the sting of defeat bubbling in Terry's eyes. She braces for a forlorn embrace.

"Make sure you come by as soon as you get back, okay?" Jessa's voice can be heard falling from audibility.

Terry's voice trembles one shrill syllable to his wife, "Jake."

Pleroma's eyes widen as she quietly gasps.

"Thank you, Jessa," she says speaking down into her husband's quaking androind peering into his eyes.

Pleroma cups her palm around his trembling hand to finally hang up the immeasurably heartbreaking phone call. Having already made peace with succinct answers, she doesn't ask further questions. Tear shrinks into her arms behind the counter as she rubs his back.

La watched from the living room as anguish filled the kitchen air. At that moment, he understood one of life’s only unchanging truths. The only truth he couldn't handle then was how much parents often lied to children about these things days after.

He thought he handled stress well because it made him laugh, and would rather go cold until tears snowed out of him. But those memories eclipsed anxieties, replaying two silhouettes setting behind a marble-top horizon. And Uncle J became Atlas to him, while gravity pulled down everyone else.

New pain tickled compared to the past, but it didn't give him the right to taunt Uji so mercilessly. Any legionnaire of the Freed Rebel Battalion might take it personally, so the last thing La saw was the word Ujasiri carved into the buttstock of a Kalashnikov.

____

Laying on his tin shack’s floor with gauze draped over his left eye, he wondered how long it had been and why Uji didn't blow him away.

"I don't want your damn pity!" La snarled, throwing the eyepatch onto the empty mattress.

He then realizes how loud echoes can get when there's no one else to talk to. Walking across the room, he can barely see his own face but believes the broken reflection. It seems to warn him to be careful when looking into darkened mirrors because if you stare too long, you’ll only see a monster staring back.

Unaware of what's watching him, La talks to his blurring self.

“You would've been 13 in December.”

The boy's afraid to close his lonely hazel eye because he's certain that he’s all out of tomorrows. And he never found the floor so irresistible until now, but not because the dreams grew stranger as they accumulated inside of a rolled-up bed sheet stuffed inside a pillowcase. Eighteen singed British American Tobacco cigarettes in an ashtray numbered his days while malaria robbed the mind blind of just how many he'd slept through.

Time skipped when the nicotine addiction couldn't muster enough strength to wake him. The abandoned patient unknowingly spent over three weeks imagining when the squirms in his face would finally eat through the bandages to free themselves.

____

Searching dyspnea-faded thoughts for a happier ending, disillusion floods La's senses before reality bids him one last warning. It's a cautionary tale about people who the purest gold buries itself inside of, the ones who erode themselves faster than they're ever able to shine. He digs into his pocket for a braided seafoam-green paracord rope, then pushes his scarred finger through its snap-hook after wrapping it around his fist.

An army dog tag hangs from its D-ring. On it, embossed texts read Jacob Visualante, Phone# 914-886-5874, 12 Deans Ln, Bayville, NY 11709. Uncle J gave it to La a week before they boarded the plane. It was the last gift that had stopped giving, now no one would be home to answer his call.

He untucks a 1.5” golden egg out of his soiled V-neck collar. It's a folding locket attached to black metallic wire around his neck. The brilliant oval splits horizontally into five parts. It opens up like a flower on La's faintly moving chest.

A saintly family looks up from inside the clover cross. Terry spreads the wings of his face into a Cheshire smile in the North frame above the compass center. Lustrous curls almost fall out of the East frame. They encase ebony contrasted against eyes so hazel that daylight transforms them into petrified honey.

But La no longer recognizes the eight-year-old in the West frame. It was just another privileged American kid. The type of cretin so spoiled that if you took their cellphones, their nails would dig their palm for answers until it bled.

The oval directly below the compass was their southpaw. Inside it, La's best friend huffed gaily into the lens a final time. She was a glowing-grey-eyed blue-nose pit with a stone-grey fur coat. La named her Jake, but his Uncle called her gargoyle.

In the photograph, she donned the bright green paracord leash La had wrapped around his fist. The one that let La know Uji pitied his starving heart so much he brought it back. At the end of the day, at least the mercenary gave La a name.

"Candyman," he whispered dreadfully, then pointed to the cover of Le Potentiel's publication.

On its front page, a silver-haired American executive shook little hollow-shelled hands with a Prime Minister. The devilish headline read, "Supreme Court Win For Candy Company CEO in Trafficking Case."  

With that, La thrust his pain upon others by taking things they loved away from them. He hoped to one day steal the sun since what he took was never anything worth missing.

____

If there were swine that black pearls are not entirely lost on, it was a boy who could barely pry himself awake. You’d think a date with destiny tied his stomach too nervous to flirt with sandmen, but having only one good eye left to lull just made it easier for him to lose the fight.

Pleroma once read to her philomath son, “Red-green and yellow-blue are forbidden colors. The human eye cannot perceive these light frequencies simultaneously because they only cancel each other out.”

So the child never stopped wondering what colors angels are. Hopefully, the seizure will heal his aphantasia. Then he'll finally get to see what paints itself invisible. If not, he understood why it always hid.

No one asks if you're okay when you're spilling too much light, they just bask in your blood after rubbing SPF. Suddenly, La swears he feels a feather write across his eye with calamus pricks. The sting confirms tears are only clear because bleeding from grief is forbidden.

Peace fills him, and the last thing he remembers is an excerpt of his mother's poetry.

"I'd grant those meteorites my curse to want to fall so deeply forever that they never crater through another's universe."

These last words are a prayer until the convulsing is finally over, and we arrive at another question. What happens when you’re sure you’ll never open your eyes again, but the world darkens before you can even close them? Does a tiny buzzer of a specter loom? This night, a black pearl hovered above a body casting judgment.

La doesn't remember splashing into another galaxy, but suddenly he's standing without ever having gotten up. The soft surface under his feet shocks him, but not as much as the terrifying sound in the unknown distance.

Whoosh……whoosh……whoosh.

Either it’s a two-hundred-foot rotor blade of terror turbine spinning at thirty-five beheadings per hour, or La left his own body to hear his heartbeat slowly die inside him. Either way, he was too weak to raise his eyelid up to a squint.

The whooshing came less frequently until each of its sudden interruptions felt more menacing than the last. Then came the type of cemetery silence you experience before realizing the monster's standing right in front of you. Afraid to die again, La opens his eye.

What he sees paralyzes him beneath a thousand tiny suns. A thirty-foot pyramid laggardly rotates ten feet above what resembles dust from filed-down magnets spilled for miles.

Something unseen rotated the polyhedron hauntingly like it dried up the sea, then summoned its ghost to be its whirlpool. In stopping, this specter of doom was even more sinister against the million-star backsplash. It was darkest at its stillest, and if every straight line is bent alive by chaos, then this place is where death must go to die.

"A magic that black can't be good," he warns himself.

Suddenly, soundless steam gushes out of lines exuding light, their connection is blessed by three bonds. Each etch hushed itself as if silenced by the invisible finger simultaneously slicing a nabla shape out of the pyramid’s face. When it ejects, the rejected plate hovers unassisted to overhang an emptiness that only it can fill.

None ever saw who vertically rotated the floating disc sideways to set it right. That new delta overlaying its entrance made a hexagrammic eclipse. La finally knows he isn't dead when something moves from behind the black gnomon guard of the dark versus light David star.

Suddenly, his face contorts with a horrifying epiphany. The silhouette flowing into the smog was only a massive limb. It was as if the thing merely dipped its foot in to see if the sand was hot. After investigating, it poured its all into the smokescreen.

If shimmering darkness was a man, it launched fifteen feet into the air and never came back down. What rose from the mist of the Osirian grave cast a shadow that could wrap an already gloomy world inside a second coat of dusk.

Its crimson robe glides about its limbs in serpentine infinities as every muscle bulges. Starlight scintillates beneath the living thread, redistributing itself along veins the width of sidewinders that ripple through a layer of supple onyx.

If there were instructions for how to breathe inside this nightmare plane, La would’ve done the opposite. But if the pummeling inside his chest were any indication, having a functional respiratory system didn’t change a thing.

____

He thought he saw two horns, but the way the split mane slowly spiraled without winds to blow it to life would boggle any mind made up of too much religion. And beneath these wiry strands of war, sandblasted smooth features facelessly expressed enmity.

La now realized the meaning behind the riddle of the doorway. It was inverse. So when he clasped his compass in hopes that maybe heaven was an idea people could dream themselves to, he ended up in this interdimensional hell instead.

The smooth surface was now full of craters in a straight line to where he stood from the tyrant tilling the ground with its prowling gait. All 14 feet of it now towered over La as it began to speak without a mouth.

"Recompense." It insists, at one word per minute in 1.3 Octaves.

Its voice wasn't the menacing metallic tone La expected, it was simply the voice of a calm man. Still terrified, La wondered how words came from a blank face without a mouth. Then another word came, and another. It sped its speech up to 30 words per minute at 1.5 Octaves. Each time it spoke, its voice got a little higher.

La tries to make his own thoughts into sounds but can only hear them in his head. Then the being's words start coming in waves at 2 octaves. And as he spoke streams of words, a black pearl blinked into visibility on the right side of the gargantuan's face.

"Pop."

The voice explains that planets are just the eggs of great souls. And every time a great soul is born, a planet is made desolate. He reveals that humans don't know that mythologies are not fiction. They were memories encoded, resurging up from the dormant seeds inside them.

That's why the barren planets of our solar system are named after great souls. And what we think is humanity is just a flesh-mech suit, protecting fetus-like beings harbored in us.

"You were bred to cultivate child gods," It said.

"When we die, they leave the hosts and lodge in new ones." It proclaims to its silent audience.

"They prefer newborns. The younger the host, the better. It guarantees a longer time to cultivate without interruption.  Right now, it would leave to a younger one since there is no air in your lungs. But it is me keeping it here with you. What you're hearing is not just a heartbeat."

The monster continues its monologue.

"What we call a human soul is actually the child hidden by light. It's like a star encased in mountains of skin. Revealed by spells not cast in words, but wavelengths beyond visibility."

It pauses.

"If this is beyond your comprehension, I will show you."

These words sound like a threat to a boy who doesn't want to be there. La gestures angrily, trying to argue, but can't make a sound. Then, his mouse-like objection is rebuked harshly.

" Silence, you linguists of false light! There are dictionaries with words next to your own, so never think it is really you who is speaking! Never try to teach me what you know! I know unknown things!"

Another black pearl evolves on the left side of the voided face.

"Pop"

With each sentence, the lilt of the words rises. First, it gurgles, then roars until it overwhelms the second sense.

" I can say everything in a secret way, and they'd hear nothing but dream and dance! They'll hear nothing but teary stars, waking up to seas!! Gagging for air with their lives still painted on the brush tongues of water deities!"

La realized the voice was oscillating upwards in octaves like the vroom of cafe racers passing by his old Bronx window. Soon he could only make out one word at a time.

As the being's words sped up, its pearly eyes began to glow. They blazed brighter as its pitch hit the seventh octave. Its voice hits a coloratura soprano as the eyes blaze like stars. Then, they begin to move counter-clockwise, like two Coi revolving around each other.

And the swirling eyes seemed to multiply into smaller ones. Each a newly lit star like little red dwarves popping into existence. And the higher the voice got, the faster the words sped.

The sound of it climbed, no longer resembling a string of consonants.

____

As the voice oscillates, a star swirls closer to the lower center of the vacant face. The multitude of afterlives made room for the small sun. It was a mouthpiece that had no lips. You just knew when it didn't speak since all the smaller stars sit paralyzed.

Its pitch was so high that other gods trembled when hearing it rip the muting of space. Still, the proverbial sound of silence climbed.

La could feel his bones rattling. The specter hovering above him was like the 14-foot wolf in front of a lamb.

 He could feel the blood gurgling through his arteries. Chronos would make good on his promise. Suddenly, the beating in his chest alarmed him about the threat from earlier.

An arsenal of embolisms pushed what little courage was left out of the small boy's heart. His insides began to bubble over as the sound of the swirling face escalated them.

La's veins pumped gallons per second. It felt like every cell in his blood followed the voice of the void-faced piper.

His five-foot body retched as his insides rushed to the surface. Then the vibration travels from his feet to his head. It continues until his skin begins unraveling.

______

The white noise played double dutch with every ligament, vein, and gland in his body. La's veins peel off of his flesh. Next, the flesh falls off the bone from a scale too terrifying for the most daring coloratura soprano to arrive at.

Then, it lays bare the bones. His organs are made a blur from the speed of the sound nothing could hear outside themselves. Finally, they fall away to reveal a fetus.

The tiny being glowed hot, made visible by the reeling. Its temperature seemed to follow the high pitch. It glowed hotter, yearning like a ripened grape. The Oni's huge fingers delicately pluck the tiny soul out of the flesh like a prayer.

If La had known, he would've said, "Here." in humility. Who would dare cross a wanderer who would rip a universe apart just to free an insect from a cage?

The voice climbed too high to hear but not too distant to feel. So the fetus-like creature swirled in the huge shimmering palm. These blind children waltzed without wind to blow them. They only heard a silent symphony duplicating them for thrills.

La's unraveled body lay there. He knew the voice was still rising since his entrails continued to bubble over. And his eye was the one that sanity neglected. It could do nothing but examine the ceremony.

He could see the frequency spawning identical souls but couldn't hear it. He knew it was still there since he could feel his organs repel. They wiggled away from each other like sea creatures trying to live on separate ocean floors.

When La looked up, twenty tiny red creatures swarmed in the extradimensional monstrosity's palm. The giant then lowers itself to poke a two-foot hole in the dirt with just one finger. Next, it drops four duplicated souls into the titan-made crater, then covers black soil over them with just a scratch.

As the faceless brute took eight red souls in one hand, it shook the other eight in its right before crushing them. Blood seeped between its fingers onto the mound where he buried the first four.

When tuning forks are organs struck in unison, La's blob of a body erupts. The red blade shakes the black earth off to sprout, and one could ask was Genesis just another dead planet's resurrection?

Whatever braided the grass of bloody blades into a bole fazed them into ashen bark. Each bleak bud blossomed into fanning leaves, but only one revealed the strangest fruit. As the walking hell tower looked down, its stare intersects with La's looking up. A pomegranate-shaded newborn bends its charcoal branches between them. The red-fruit child grows too heavy for the branch, falls from the tree, and is now a man hunkered in fetal position.

Without life, the ruddy man was nurtured by the tree it cannot survive without. La is muted, forced to wonder as the massive hand hovers over. Then, three of the remaining tiny gods drop from its fingers.

Frozen in their infant stage, they land right in the middle of La's combusting body. La's innards lower to a fizzle while the primordial entity's face reels as the red man's body quakes.

Below black Brobdingnagian's brow, a black hole opens. The stars


 fall up the sky of his unswirling face. Its supernova mouth shrinks, the ringing sound returns to the unattached tympanic membranes, and the other tiny sun dims like a dying star above the cheek. Reflections start to become pure shadows again in its pre-Atlantian face. Then La's flesh starts to envelop its bones. 

His veins wrap around his flesh, and his skin engulfs his retching sense organs. It spreads over each organ like a pharyngeal jaw, then tightens around them. His joints crack back into position. Then, as the interstellar monster stares down, some event horizon behind its face pulls the black pearl back into its clam.

All while La's mouth gapes naked and in awe with remade legs. Screeching high octaves abate as the cadence slows, and the void-faced goliath's two unwieldy fingers stretch to the red mort's head. As it pulls away its massive forefinger and thumb, it caresses an eyeball between them, carrying it reverently as if terrified to slightly pinch the unseen.

Several wriggling vines sprout from behind the retinal walls, then twitch. The colossus's spirants slow as what resembles a pulsing neonatal red cephalopod rest on La's malar bone.

Its nerves suddenly dart through the ocular orbit to the back of La's mind. The boy's head jolts as they fasten inside his frontal lobe. With the eye of its core shook loose, the red pile of bones ceased their bubbling.

The titan turns to face its home. The slightest light reflects like lightning flashes rolling down its back; in it, you can even see the lifeless face of the golem. La watches it all, awestruck at the god-like being strolling across the black sand to its floating Sinai.

Then, the aberration fades behind the hovering triangle. The floating door rotates vertically and then falls back into place. Its edges liquefy, merging with the ship. The whooshing sound returns as each of the pyramid's hues burn brighter than the last.

La knows now that this synagogue can instantly travel to whatever pole star it points to. And it sometimes wobbles at the axis of the planet it misses most.

As it brightens, La makes out what seems to be glyphs etched along its surface. The characters blur as the polyhedron spins faster. He pushes his head behind his arm to block his face but can't stop from witnessing the red cadaver dissolve into the black sand.

He suddenly remembers the dark pearl from the mine. And how it was like the tip of an iceberg poking out of dimensions instead of oceans.

As the boy closes his eyelids, he can still see the glaring silhouette of the delta. It becomes the source of an effulgence so dazzling it washes the megacosms white. Before climaxing into a forbidden color, the last glimpse of the writing on the wall whispers…

"To wish you didn't need air because it doesn't care if you breathe."

While trying to untangle the meaning, Lazaro gasped so sharply that his lungs blast open. The terror in Isha's face melts away to awe, and the drifting pearl between them blurs. Her dead friend's eyes explode with reanimation. One iris is a maelstrom of nebulae. Pleroma's amber halo flickers throughout the other.