Diruktober Day 1: Blossoming Beezlebub

Diruktober is a DIR EN GREY themed inktober challenge by re_be_ka_f. I chose to use them as writing prompts to join in on the fun. 





I laid there on my cot. The smell of the straw pillow was made even more pleasant by the gentle breeze of the first whisper of autumn. They had moved me outside. I billowed an acute awareness of impending death, but moreso I had asked to be laid in the courtyard of the village. As the softer parts of my face began to rot and fall off, my appearance would scare the children. My nieces and nephews who had once ridden my shoulders and shared meals with me now avoided the dark spot in the courtyard that had become my cot. 

One day, after my sister had come to feed me porridge, I noticed a small bird resting beside me. The awareness that family members were refusing to take up the chore of spooning gruel into their best estimate of my mouth was almost lost in that sweet little bird. It sang a song to me as if expecting to start a nest on the branches that had become a sickly me. After that, it flew away. 


The next day, I awoke to an autumn breeze, a sweet scent of a straw pillow, a dead bird only a few feet from my head. 

I felt first mournful. The sweet little bird that had helped me to break apart my day of watching fading leaves waver in their trees and rolling clouds as the sun passed and passed until it was night again had died. 

I then felt envious. This bird had died while bearing no burdens to anyone. It was able to die, no matter how, without scaring children or causing a fight over who would feed it but instead after bringing only joy. Perhaps it had been attracted to the death which loomed so near me the day before. Perhaps it had been caught up in its stench so much so that it, too, had fallen ill and died right there. Its body was still soft, and as the day went on, it started to weep in the sun. 

After that, I felt peaceful as if this bird and I lie here in solidarity in death. I wondered how long it would take for it to reach me. 


On the third day, two cockroaches lie upturned in the filth that the birds body had wept. It had turned to a brown stain on the concrete path. Their feast upon death had in turn killed them, too. 

It was this day that I asked my sister to turn me over. I wanted to observe my avian neighbor in death. As it began to rot, I too, began to rot on the inside. Fetid boils and pustules and holes of disease bore into my flesh. I no longer smelled the pleasant and faint scent of my straw pillow. Instead, I smelled the death that everyone else had long ago. 

As I watched its body swell and writhe, a rich home for the maggots, I wondered if those same maggots would be the ones to eat me, how long my body would go unnoticed. Not more than a day. 


It was the fourth day that I began to wonder when those maggots would bloom. I felt the gentle, wet squirming on my arm as they wandered towards me, mistaking me for a pile of rot. I watched as death became life again, these putrid harvesters and predators feeding death to everything along the food chain. It was inescapable. It was inevitable. 


It was the fifth day that I, too, died. 

It was a relief for most of my family. They would no longer argue about who would feed me, who would change the bandages covering my face, more for the neighbors sake than my own. I would no longer bear the reminders of death that so wounded everyone who happened to pass me there in the courtyard, silently enjoying the nice weather, the smell of a straw pillow, and the rustle of the leaves in their trees. 


My body was buried and I hope that it made good soil, good soul for the forest who’s edge in which I was left. 

I hope that one day a little songbird will die in the branches that had become me and blossom its ecosystem of decay. 


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