West hell.

On my back, on the floor in the office. The white corkboard tiles of the ceiling are reflecting traffic from the street two flights below. Leaning against my desk is a paper cup half filled with water that I’ve been sipping from. I’m just a shrug away from the cup by the desk. It’s not directly next to my hand, so I won’t accidentally knock it over. It’s almost noon. I’m completely exhausted. I can’t hear anything outside my office; no rustling papers, no muted voices beyond the door. No footfalls in the hall bleed through the closed door. But I can hear the traffic outside quite clearly. The vehicles starting and stopping at the intersection, the sound of certain brakes whining to a halt while other engines are growling to resume. It’s muted beyond the glass wall of the office. I’m bathed in sunlight. I wish I had had the foresight to draw the blinds. But I have no intention of getting up for a while. The top two buttons of my shirt are undone. My tie is loosened. I’ve kicked my shoes off and they’re somewhere next to my feet. I’m laying down ruler straight, like a body in a casket; my hands are by my side. I’m watching the reflection of traffic on the ceiling. I don’t have any clue what I’m going to do when work is over, when it’s time to leave the office. But that’s a long time from now, so I’m okay. The lunch hour is right around the corner. Then four more hours of work. No one’s knocked on my office door since ten. I got on the floor shortly after that. It feels like the floor is spinning. It feels like I’ve been drinking. I haven’t been drinking. Not for a week. I haven’t had anything. Not much more than water from the fountain. I did have breakfast this morning. On the go. From the cafeteria in the hospital across the street. That feels so long ago. My stomach is growling, which I can hear. I can only feel the floor spinning, but not the emptiness of my stomach. I don’t have any energy. No desire. No will. No plans. Sometimes it feels like my face is going to bump into the ceiling. The floor is spinning awfully close to the ceiling. Orbit. I think it’s a panic attack. Or grief, mixed in with a panic attack. I just don’t know what to do. This has been the longest week of my life. They keep telling me to take time off, but I haven’t taken a single day off since my wife passed way. It happened on Sunday and I went straight back to work on Monday morning. Straight to work. A sign outside on the knob of the office door that says please do not bother has been working. No visitors since around ten. They probably think I’m fragile right now. And I am; who wouldn’t be? I don’t know what to do now. I can’t be expected to know, but at least I still show up to work. They’ll send me home by next week. I’ll still have my job when I get back. Work’s not something I’m worried about anymore.

I hope you find me again.

The horse-haunted overworked gardener spirals through the yards all the day and night, singing his broken voice into swoons which at all hours cause great alarm to the occupants of the house. Our dreams are, by and large, in unreal terror of him. We are infected with his fears and adversely overwhelmed by his joys, the latter of which are seldom and entirely frightening.

Let it fall like a curtain. The majority of us are meant to perish.

This pensive term of pregnancy, both fragile and persevered, yielded in its nuanced expulsion an exoskeleton quite unlike all previous applied terms. The genesis of the child, coiled within a pasty egg yellow cocoon and writhing in the hands of an aghast deliverer, created something of an instance in panic and somaesthetic wailing in the small kitchen. The wine glasses on the racks underneath the cupboards rattled. The child, from within its skin, screamed into the misty morning air with a succinct pop not entirely dismissive of the refrain heard from a champagne uncorking. And that is when it was discovered the child’s head had collapsed in on itself; under what strain, we were helpless to uncover. We were helpless in the room where blood and stripped placenta slicked the green-tiled floor, and the faces of our guardian angels became twisted with equal portions of envy, rage and complete wonder.

(Source: corpseonpumpkin.com)

I pulled you closer to where I was by holding on to your dress. In the dark, in the water, it was hard to make out anything but the white parts of your eyes. You were blinking rapidly and that’s how I found you without having to say anything out loud; both of us were too frantic to speak anyway. Up on the porch above another gunshot exploded out in the flood night, so close to where we were underneath him that my skull rang like a bell, felt like it would burst. It wouldn’t end until he’d killed all of us. Me and you huddled in the rising water under the porch as the storm covered up the sound of our father’s shotgun. Crouching down, the water was up to our shoulders now. I kissed you on your damp cheek and tasted soil and garbage from the flood water tearing up our street.

IRREGULAR SEWING PATTERNS - 105 Portraits By Jaret Ferratusco.

It is not above as it is below the Heavens.

(View full gallery on Corpse On Pumpkin’s page at Facebook.)

Follow you into your death.

(Source: corpseonpumpkin.com)

At the front gate of Eleph Home, folding your hands in the fog.

(Source: corpseonpumpkin.com)