Number 265

Cold, damp hands
Grasp through the writhing darkness
Filthy needles tear and pierce
Like sharpened swords ready to pounce from their sheaths
Blinding light, arises like an artificial sun from the earth
Tapered down with cruel iron clasps
The pain, consuming and spitting
Frozen scalpels cut deep,
Into the flowing rivers of crimson as they break their walls
Tall figures masked by the piercing light mouth words in a foreign tongue
Chants and babbles
Tainted venom like the wounds with spiteful tongues
The smell of bleach pollutes the air
Choking and spluttering
Falling, down, down, down
Into an enigma of nothingness
A cruel limbo where I’m neither dead nor alive
A being without purpose,
Dark

Slowly dull eyes open to the cruel embrace of the rusted cage; fellow others lie and twitch unresting on the cold iron kiss of the spiteful wires, fragments of dulled metal drill deeper and deeper into their minds.
The putrid odor of foul rotten kibble littered with the bodies of roaches and other creatures of the night, plagues the air, consuming and suffocating.
The icy steel bars of the base of the enclosing cage sink deep into the paws, staring at my paw as watery blood begins to pool reanimating crude scars.
The crimson sea grows greater and greater, an alien world I do not know.
Painfully my worn irises slowly scan the decaying cage that is my abode, there I see….
Sprawled lifeless like an old rug the world tossed aside she lays there, Pilot….
As I limp to her cold side on frost bitten paws, I gaze deep into the once moonlight orbs that were her eyes, now merely a pair of dim irises that exist in a chilled corpse, her tattered grey coat tarnished by years of neglect unraveling from her weary carcass.

Many times we would comfort one another as the merciless wind bit beneath our bedraggled coats. She spun me elaborate tales of a land where rivers flow with creamy pearl milk and gleaming silver fish leap gleefully into the azure sky, a place where the gentle sun beams down loving rays to bathe the world in warmth, where our serene brothers and sisters laze peacefully on silken grass as it nestles them in its emerald bliss.

I had once believed her when I was a foolish young kitten but now as time painfully taught me, it merely became the crazed babbles of a world once been.
Pilot was a withered creature, with a once cascading stone veil which time in this tormenting underworld had chiseled away into a shattered reminiscence, aged from the plight of living.

I dare not caress her for it is not my Pilot simply a frozen shell or cruel illusion trying to spite me with its monstrous evil.

The reign of the night is ending as the feeble sun desperately tries to shine its solace through the woven blanket of smog that clothes our world, the coming of winter draws near as the desolate gale moans and cries through the rickety rotten floor boards, caught in a realm where there is no time. no space no air, listening to every word passed through cracked lips, without knowledge whether the truth is seen or a masked tale

I hate that sound, the taunting coos of the grey clad pigeons as they perch themselves just above reach from swiping claws. How blessed they are to be able to fly free in the warm dusk air, the breeze rippling through their soft feathers. not caged like a trapped animal! The wind creeps and moans through the rust adorned pipes.
The sound I despise most is the sound of Kafir, that chilling rattling he creates as he slams against the forbidding bars. Kafir shares my prison with five others now that Pilot has left us for the land of pearl milk and fish, his rough face deformed by an adornment of savage scars, his ears tattered from countless scrape and burn tests, every passing breath of time he sits there at the dark corner of the cage, secluded only through his mind, he stiffly poses there, moving back and forth, back and forth, digging his unkempt auburn coat into the sinister moan of the bars as they skin deeper and deeper into his flesh. He only ceases to eat or defecate, never a single syllable has passed between us never a glance into his deep cobalt soul.

The boredom is burrowing its foul presence into my mind, strange, between sleeping and the tests we remain suspended in a murky portrait.

I try in vain to communicate with the others but they are too tightly bound, each in their own small universe. One particularly hostile creature, Coal, is the plight of my daily struggle to survive in our private community. She is a great hulking beast with a muddy brown coat interrupted with the occasional blossom of milky scar tissue. It’s amazing how indifferent scar tissue is; it has no life, no story. It just remains there unaffected by time, enclosing us in a protective amour. Impenetrable to discrimination or fear it’s just there as a daily reminder of the necessity of our pain.

“What are you gawking at Puny?” echoes the cold voice of Coal. I shudder as I conjure myself out of my trance, “N-nothing Coal,” I stammer, “just thinking”
The icy cage rattles violently as she lumbers towards me. I am a lot smaller than the others and her great height dwarves me into nothing but a mere moaning apparition. “Oh that’s something new, isn’t it, Puny has an idea!” she cackles. “You think and think about life outside this, but what use is it? Soon you’ll just be another whittled little body that no one gives a second thought about”. I wince as she pushes her great mass, burying me deeper and deeper into the wires. I can smell the metallic odor as my watery blood trickles down, cascading, dissolving into the great mounds of feces that pile high into the air. It hurts.
As the time passes, I know not of how long, I desperately try to occupy myself to sneak under the searing shroud of boredom and repetition. Carefully, daintily I groom myself, wincing as my coarse salmon tongue brushes against my branded body. waiting for the time that they take me.

As the thick deformed paws seized me from the inside of my prison, I yowl and scratch fiercely but this monster…this fiend is wrapping his grotesque appendages tighter and tighter. I can’t breathe, the air searing and tearing at my lungs, those icy oozing clasps constricting me. As the foul beast roughly grasps me, he lumbers through the frozen halls; awkward cries of his footsteps as he trudges past mountains of piled worn cages dimly glinting in the feeble light.

My tarnished eyes slide into the embrace of the dozens of cages. There sleep the bodies of my brothers and sisters, distorted beings, their eyes fester, the restless hum of the carriage drivers of the gone as they hover to claim their cold stiff corpses, to unravel the very essence of their presence in this cruel labyrinth

The horror, oh the deformity…

Dark looming silhouettes are dirtily sketched into the canvas that surrounds. Time oozes down as I pass from the kingdom of the rats, I hear them writhing in sheer agony as their man made poisonous growths slowly laced upon their raw flesh, oh so slowly devours them from the inside out to that of the monkeys; circling their gaols like caged animals, frail tattered flesh teeters from remnants of hands.
Violently twitching as alien instruments buzz and whine like new born kit, the chafing squeal of their so called music replaying over and over, as they plunge their cascading pipes down deep. They are forever scarred with the foul mutterings that has been scrawled along their pale flesh.

As finally we near the gates to the realm of suffering, I remember my dear Pilot, I see her silken coat as it radiates loving gentleness; she mouths words but I cannot hear above the buzz of the ambience, soon she fades back into the meager ray of light that filters through the lies and she is gone.

I am savagely thrust down onto a glinting table of metal; I try to shriek as the barbed needle pierces my skin. The creatures with their big black eyes that burn my soul, laugh and snicker.
I try to fight but I feel so feeble, barely able to lift a paw to cower behind.
My body held down by their tainted claws, as the abyss arrives to once again drown me in its sea of despair; I glance to see the rag doll body of a brother, grimace distorted by agony, he is blind… milky white pools. No longer a cat, he is merely an instrument used for human greed.
My now weary eyelids drop like the dying petals of a flower succumbing to the incoming winter, soon to be nothing but a tapestry of inky clouds. I hear piercing shrieks of horror and realize it is me, crying.
“Please stop, Stop!!!”
“Please just kill me, I want to die I want to die! Why won’t you listen?”
One of the creatures strikes me with a metal embroided fist. “Shut up you little bitch!” she shrieks, smashing her ooze-coated fist against my ribs, CRACK!!!
She lets out a banshee scream as I with my last morsel of energy sink my glassy claws deep into her naked flesh.
As I watch tears spring to her hateful eyes, I feel myself growing more and more indifferent: I no longer care for this mortal world that builds immortality upon our pain.
As my life slowly ebbs away, I smile sweetly as merciful death comes to claim me.
The world I once knew gradually slips into a inky abyss, no time no space, I can feel the tender nuzzle as it surrounds me
“I’ll see you soon Pilot” I breathe through drought infested lips as I succumb to the tranquil sigh of the darkness. I am falling…..

Number: an arithmetical value represented by a a word or symbol
used for the purpose of a quota
that I am not, nor will I ever be again