Another 3 Am


He sits atop a lonely mountaintop which looks high above the city he lives in; the wind blowing through his bones like brain-freezys to the skin  and the chill, crisp taste of October on his tongue. He watches the unnumbered stars and souls set above his lonely city burn and twist and fall like redempt-something and wonders why he can't pronounce the word. The feeling doesn't last. His mind is peaceful and emoty. There are no voices here to cajole him into murderous-rages. There are no doughboys to affect his tentative grip on reality.

(They did not walk. They did not speak. The wall did not contain his own personal hell.)

There is only softness and silence. Only silver and cold. He watches twinkling infinities snuff-out and rise like tiny, infinitesimal, white-hot phoenixes and wonders: Am I real?
He only wonders this because of sleep. And sleep was his enemy. Moreso than waking; which drove him mad.

Johnny C hates being mad and confused but finds himself at these places far too often.

Johnny contemplates existence, striking a match and lighting the sky on fire with a breath. He had recently woken up from a long-standing nightmare and this bothers him. Bothers him more than that guy who called him a faggot the other day. He twists and turns what he had saw, what he had done, over and over in his mind.

Too little too late, he realizes that it must've been a dream of someone else in a different reality and he's woken up. Woken up from a time and place where he was bound to something and someone by binds deeper than blood but shallower than sanity. He had done something. Had shaken the cosmic order to it’s core and traversed both Heaven and Hell; seeing both GOD and SATAN but believing in neither. Johnny sighs and tries to remember what had caused it; to piece together his shattered memories. He grasps at the emerald flashes, grips them in between skeletal fingers in front of an onyx, infinate miror, and feels them slip away. He can’t hold onto his mind anymore. Not fully.  

Everything that had happened...He shakes his head. That was all yesterday, yesteryear. In a time where he had pain and insanity and needed to paint to keep a demon at bay.

He takes hesitant, purposeful steps away from his car and looks to the horizon. The city below is like a sea of fire; oranges, reds, and yellows burning like a thousand-billion candles set before a dark, infinite expanse. He knows the city offers no warmth, no protection. It is a cesspool of hurt and lies. A place where he is mocked for his appearance and morals.

But he can change all that. He can set his people free...

Johnny C twists the knife in his hand; a bitter laugh escaping from his lips like thorns from the earth to the sky. The smile on the knife is like the smile he had carved earlier today. Sleek and deadly, wide and ear-reaching. Silver but crimson. He laughs again; psychotic as the smile on the happy little nub at the end of the knife, and wonders what he had been thinking about.

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‘Johnny, you can’t do this.’, Devi D whispers somewhere, to someone, for some reason.

She clutches the dark purple sheets of her bed tighter to her svelte, ivory body; frowning and scowling at unseen demons in her sleep and in her head. She is torn between her Word and her World in her dream but doesn’t know it.

Sitting in a space somewhere far from home. She curled up against the man behind her, his soft arms around her waist like a soothing something she had lost so long ago.

‘Devi...’, the thorns were buried deep and the madness had all but gone.

‘Shush’ She doesn’t want to turn around. The sunset on their beautiful city was too perfect; too beautiful to classify with petty, inarticulate words. So was the man behind her. So was the thing inside of her heart. She felt Johnny smile something close to salvation and place his head ontop of hers; his eyes searching the sky as if asking it things he would never say to her. Devi D didn’t mind. She placed her hands atop the ones around her waist; the mosaic of the sky meeting the horizon of the Earth in a dripping tapestry of red, violet, and sapphire.

‘Devi...’

Red, violet, sapphire, silver. She’s falling out of her dreamworld into a nightmare of sex and violence. He’s pressed her against the wall, screaming something in her ear and dragging the knife out of his back pocket. She smiles happily, insanily; arms around his waist and lips near his ear whispering something about perfection.

The knife flashes. The screams become one. Her perceptions are shattered like an emerald held too close to the sun.

Devi D sits up in her bed, panting and screaming until there was nothing left that was vocal inside of her. She checks herself and checks her room, her house, her prison. The door is still locked. Sickness is still burned. The numbers on her phone show 2 missed calls. She doesn’t know one of them was from Johnny but can guess that other is from Tenna; who she has been avoiding like the plague just to keep her away from everything which haunted (hunter her)

(Or at least, that's what she kept telling herself.)

That gets her thinking. She hasn’t seen Johnny at the store for so long and it almost hurts; despite the way he had tried to kill her. She hasn't seen Tenna, and knows she should visit her sometime in the near future.

Maybe.
Possibly.
If she could walk out of her house.

Devi D has a fucked up sense of caring, and it doesn’t show.

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Johnny C has a fucked up sense of caring too, and it does.

He looks at the stars and the earth and the moon and the sky; smiling as if they were his closest treasures and whispering something about perfection to a someone who doesn’t care. He looks to the stars, counting the billions and wishing he were one of them. Another 5-am and Johnny wonders where souls go. Do they become stars, he wishes. Do they live on, he lies.

Johnny knows where all souls go because he’s been there already. What he doesn’t know is that GOD is relative and lazy. If he needed a new waste-lock he just...

.... Johnny steps upon the knife-edged precipice without a smile, the thorns in his voice replaced by the beautiful memory and litany of his prayer. He knows that as a waste-lock, as a shit-keep for the sins of humanity; that, if he were to die, everything would be released back into the world.

“Your sins into me, oh my beautiful ones.”

Johnny fell from the highest mountain; a smile on his face and a beautiful sadness in his eyes.




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: Finis :

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- And the world knew of true pain.