Glory

Day was trundling down the hill of morning. It seemed to his beleaguered squint that the late morning heartbeats, with their galloping leap across the ditch-deep heat of noon, were leading him on and on again across the whin-bushy and scutch-grassy afternoon, towards a twilight oozing drearily into slumber and the pointless ennui of all being. Thus, there would unfold, as if in a malignant dream, yet another run of the daily nadirs and troughs that evaporated into the monotone voices and grey colours of mere melancholia.
And such days followed those days, with such a grim similitude of anaemic and colour-bereft hopelessness, which manifested a mediocrity of monotony with every rise and droop of hope within the drab manse of the soul, that left him more and more provisionless, in their funereal passages, that like a punctured wheel or a wounded beast, he felt the slow and coldly mathematical subtraction of his capability to think. Life and mood oozed out of him, till he could no longer eke out his existence in the counting of the suffering moments or find a calorie with which to fuel the task and toil of rising to another morn.
Notwithstanding this, he would occasionally, as if waving a bloody feather in the eye of the onslaught of the entire universe, rise to a stooped stance and tardily ache through the moments to garment his skeletal frame, ashen with a passionate hell, and battle with the intervening gloom and stumble down the stairs, as each pain-laden step belied the fact that any life-force throbbed within him, except the life of the animated crypt.
He fed the nauseous mouthfuls of breakfast into the parched and arid gap in his grey-coloured skull, his nose wiping the beastly nourishment chaotically when the feeding spoon missed its target, as he sucked and swallowed and masticated in slow and mournful movements of the jawbone, whilst within, there moaned the doleful passage of the black creeping creatures of mind, which tread through the world of time to die into the grave of moments that tell the history of all passages.
The hour now drew a melancholic drizzle across the pall of paltry time, with each futile moment calling out like an endless wail of unrelieved mockery. All things seem to precipitate their impingements upon him from out of the nothing thinness of air, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled and regurgitated in repeating thoughts that drove obsession into a minor role of shame. He heard the aching groan of ennui deep within the soul. The hopeless nothingness of misery was groaning like a thrashing mammoth caught in an almighty trap that snapped each turgid notion into a myriad feelings of utter anguish.
Nevertheless, he ventured outdoors once again looking for the briefest relief, as the siege cannons of thought and feeling pounded out their volleys of terror in vicious salvos that cut him away from the merest chink of comfort where the soul cowered in shelters that were hewn of mere and mediocre misery from the hard granite of terror.
The soul thundered with a dread and the lightning flashes were feelings that fled like lambs from the ever-encroaching wolves of everyday reality as the earth swivelled on its tottering alignment towards the void and vacuum of an endless tediousness and monotony. The hard cement where his heavy feet trudged echoed the thudding of his heart; rhythm upon rhythm of dullness played and relayed the trumpeting Last Post of the merest chink of any aspiration or ambition as his chest heaved and groaned beneath the inertia of being. Somewhere deep within the darkness within, he discerned a great howling, that roared in a tremendous torrent through the broken core of his being, leaving the broken remnants of himself scattered as flotsam and jetsam upon the painful coasts of his wakefulness.
Then, a voice, poignant, yet laden with terror, spoke within the winter wretchedness, and surging and wavelike it rose into the ken of his awareness and he retreated in fright under the alarming dread of its implications.
'All is but rotting flesh.'
For a moment, he paused between an endless chasm and an infinite crevasse, aching beneath the incessant morbidity of thinking, unable to avoid the rotting inevitability of thought coming onwards and ever.
'All is but rotting flesh.'
Momentarily, he stood as if anchored to the spot, gazing yet not seeing the gathering humanity surrounding him, oblivious to their horror, a horror provoked by the wretchedness and strangeness of his awful condition.
The voice echoed again, drilling its message into fibre and sinew of soul, taunting and provoking terror that made his heart race as oblivion and void mingled within him. His howls, echoed among the buildings, whilst his whines, his shrieks, made the onlookers quiver with dread and respectable disdain.
'All is but rotting flesh', he exclaimed.
His head was bowed now, poignant in its hopeless dilemma, as his heart pined for relief from the hell that festered and tortured him.
'Someone get a doctor.'
'Get a policeman, that guy is crazy.'
'He's a weirdo. Be careful.'
The winter rains were weeping now, mist and tears mingling, and the slow hearse of death crawled within. His exquisite sensitivities were collapsing beneath the weight of censure and reproach.
'Get that nut out of here. He could be dangerous.'
Slowly, the head of a thousand pangs gradually and almost imperceptively looked at the gathering throng in tardy jerks of the neck region. These beings, threatening by their fear, terrified him with their inconsiderateness. Remarks mounted upon remark were but stones, which were cast in ignorance across the exquisite threshold of pain.
'All is but rotting flesh.'
Gradually he moved each weighted foot into an abyss of fear, whilst the multitude, still yet gathering, grew in hostility and number, as he wept within for the merest hint of kindness to wipe the gushing blood from the wounded melancholy of the spirit.
'All is but rotting flesh.' His voice rose to the apex of its pain as the displeased throng retreated slightly, discomfited by the spectacle of this monstrous disgrace.
'Someone call the police. It's disgusting, it shouldn't be allowed.'
'All is but rotting flesh. Help me, help me', he cried. His tears mingled with the falling precipitation as the circle of onlookers grew in number and disquiet.
Then from behind a cloud a ray of gold appeared and he heard a small voice speak in clear and certain tones. 'Leave him alone! Can't you see? That man is suffering.' He rose to his feet, arms and legs stretched wide in a living cruciform and cried out with exultation.
'All is spirit. All is spirit.' He fell upon the dust and the red flood of life flowed out of him and mingled with the damp dust of the concrete street. He looked up and saw her. A little girl framed by the twilight stood over him silhouetted by the yellow luminescence of the street lamps.
'All is spirit', she whispered softly. 'Don't worry, all is spirit.' She caressed his matted hair and sang softly to him as he fainted beneath the censure of the crowd and the horror of his hell. Then she made a pillow under his head with her scarf and mumbled a silent prayer as the wailing ambulance streaked to a halt.
The horde dissipated singly and in small groups muttering curses as they went. The girl walked up the street into the future with her golden tresses dancing in the breeze behind her. She was afraid for she understood that as she grew up the world might rob her of the knowledge that the children know. She knew that some children know that 'all is spirit'. And now she was certain that that was where true glory resided.

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