Excerpt from the seventh chapter, “9."
The olfactory bulb is closest to the memory centre in the mind. My nerves tingled through my entire body as I experienced their deaths, every life shattering at the nerve endings. I held their faces in my eyes and lulled them to safety with my tears and their hearts stopped beating and died. Like fruit rotting and falling from a tree. I reached to grasp them but I couldn’t. They fell through my palms and spilled onto the ground, bursting into swarms of flies and seeds. A strange prehistoric cat stalked the insects and pounced upon them. Swallowed great gulps of them as it leapt into them. I chased the cat through the orchard, watching as it leapt and pounced from heart to heart, eating the bugs each one expelled.
Eventually the cat grew dizzy, drunk on bugs, sick from all of the stirring in its guts; it fell onto its back in a sore aching collapse, its legs sprung in the air, kicking weakly. When its limbs finally stopped jittering I noticed a zipper on its belly, running all the way up to its neck. I pulled the tab down from its chin along to its loins, it snapped suddenly, folding inside out like a reversible purse. Its guts spilled out and ruptured against a rock, as the transformed pink beast took on a chameleon like appearance and wandered away, yo-yo-ing its tongue out. The burst entrails revealed thick sticky moths, covered in hair and slime, they crawled slowly from the wet after-birth and found a patch of grass for themselves. As they found their clearing they shook like wild dogs drying themselves out, their fur stood out in random spikes, long sappy ropes of drool hung from their heaving jaws. I watched as they spread their wings wide and I was mesmerized by what I saw on them, they were emblazoned with the most elaborate painted scenes, vicious slaughter, accidental murders, so much blood I couldn’t stare directly into any one pair of wings for long without flinching away. There were so many death’s-heads leering at me, slowly they began to flap, turning the winds, and all at once I smelled the sweet aroma of all that dead rotting fruit. Its sugar crystals had hardened and when the wind grabbed them it carried them directly to my nostrils, a lattice work of sharp shards accumulated there, sticking spikes deep within the fleshy walls.
