I need you to look.
There used to be a domain on the internet that only posted grotesque pictures of violence, accidents, shootings, autopsies, and the like. He used to go there from time to time and look. It wasn’t any fetish or anything weird like that, it was more just informational. There wasn’t much difference between the violence shown there and the violence shown on the evening news, not anymore.
There’s not much time.
That changed with a few pictures. One was a picture of a motorcycle accident where a man flipped over the handlebars without a helmet. Luckily for him, he landed on his chest instead of the top of his head, therefore he lived. The downside was that his jaw was torn completely off his face. The man just sat there, bleeding, living, with his head ending below his top row of teeth.
Someone is coming. This is the end, look!
The image of this accident in particular disturbed him. He had always thought he could handle it if he lost a finger or an arm or something, but anytime someone’s face was deformed it was always disturbing. He couldn’t watch celebrity facelifts or eye surgeries either.
Open your eyes.
A line from Vanilla Sky. It was the English translation of the name of the original Spanish movie.
Open your eyes.
Suddenly his ears were attacked and his body instinctively flinched. If his eyes were opened, he would have shut them to protect them anyway. His ears hummed painfully and as hearing returned to them he imagined that his ear drums were fusing back together after being ripped in half.
The dull hum eventually faded, but his body stayed in the end result of the flinch for long moments after his hearing had returned to normal. He had squeezed his eyes shut so hard that all he could “see” was red with white and blue flashes here and there. He slowly relaxed his eye lids but kept them shut, anything to stop the sparks and fireworks going off behind them. Gradually his muscles unclenched, though his head still stayed turned away from the sound that had nearly deafened him.
He listened for any sound. A breath, a movement, a scraping of cloth on wood, rubber on tile, anything. Long moments passed before he realized he may actually be alone now, left in his previously dark room. What punishments lay ahead of him for his insubordination? The only torture left was to actually make him look at himself.
He decided that the mirror was going to be directly in front of him, and since he had turned his head he could probably take a peak at his room. He slit one eye and was instantly assaulted by fluorescent white pain. He went ahead and opened that eye all the way since he could not see anything anyway, and better to get it used to the light quickly in case his captor decided to come back and put him in the dark again.
The pure, electric white slowly faded into bright white, then down into a more natural white. As information he could interpret actually made its way to his brain, he found that many of his assumptions about the room were quite true. The quarter of it that he could see was pretty much as he thought: smallish, concrete walls painted white, white tile on the floor. He could see his left shoulder was attached to a dark brown, wooden chair by a rounded and bent metal bar.
A few tubes cascaded across his chest and arm as he pulled his eyes down to the lowest point they could still see out of the sockets. The leather strap securing his left forearm to the chair, cracked and faded here and there. He moved his left hand to confirm that it was his. Some of his nails were bent back or broken completely off and little streaks of blood trailed away from those fingertips. At the same time another pool of blood was trailing its way through the tile causeways. It welled up from a constant flow that must have been near his feet. His eyes would normally be drawn to the source but he worried that somehow the blood must be coming from him.
[CENSORED SO AS NOT TO RUIN THE ENDING]
As his head continued to turn to the right he saw two objects he could not immediately identify on the ground near him. When something disturbing appears on TV they will either blur it or black it out with a box. One object was seemingly covered in this fashion by his own mind, and the other object slowly melted its way into a gun.
Please make your response in the form of a question.
What is a gun, Alex?
There was red [CENSORED], and some pinks and blacks all inside a round-ish shape.
Bullets never move in real life the way they do in movies.
The shape came into focus more, the blacks faded into different levels of grays and browns.
Bullet wounds never bleed the way they do in movies.
It was like the way they make the clay molds of cavemen faces when they only have a skull to work with, the musculature all red and white and disturbing.
Brains almost always splatter the way they do in movies.
On the film of Kennedy it looked like he sneezed into his hand when he was shot in the neck. Then the side of his head opened with a fine mist of red. I’m sure it was much worse to actually be in the car.
© 2008 Robert Countryman
