Amputated Decapitation
by China Krys Darrington | china@thumbprint.net

.as I exit the theater, the people press in. The skin of my ass cringes, my eyes try to sink into my head. I can't stand it. I can't stand throngs of people milling about like insects. Rushing and pushing and caught in their bubble of social conduct.

".the last scene wasn't what I thought it would be, I mean, how could Anakin be so shallow not to value human life like that. Did he thing that his one love was so important."

"I know, but oh is he so hot!!! I mean before he got all burned up at the end and decapitated."

In my head I correct her. Amputated. Anakin Skywalker was amputated at the end of the Episode III Star Wars movie. His arms and legs were cut off by Obi-Wan's lightsaber. Not his head. His head would be decapitated. Appendages are amputations.

The babbler-dabblers are off and I'm caught telling myself to be mindful of my reality, not others. To live and let live. To extend compassion to others, to the whole world. Even the mindless, superficial fucks who don't have a clue. Oh, there I go. That wasn't very nice either.

The world rubs up against me like 80 grit sandpaper. It rubs away my defenses and tears raw tissue open and then keeps on rubbing. It don't mean to do it. It's just being life. For some reason I was born without the thick veneer of numbness that most other beings have.

I stretch the cord that wraps around my left wrist; the cord of intention. The cord my dharma teacher says represents my focus of intention to practice metta, loving-kindness and compassion to myself and all the world.

Fuck, but that is the hardest thing in the world sometime.

Breath. In breath. Out breath. One. In breath. Out breath. Two. I focus on the breath. I visualize the practice of letting go and opening. I breath in and my chest cracks open radiating yellow sunlight, ribcage pops and the heaving cavity of my chest makes way to let the loving-kindness of the compassionate heart blind and warm everything with its boundless energy and love.

It's so easy to do. It's so hard to remember to do it.

Breathing. Being. Embracing the moment and participating fully in my reality I find myself outside the theater. Rain softly drains its clouds on the world. Washing off the day of corruption and exploitation. The signs of the shops in the strip where the theater is tucked back, glow rainy starburst of illuminated plastic beckoning us the American consumer into continuing our consumption. Encouraging us to further gorge ourselves on the delectable items of convenience. I watch, mindfully, mind you, the throngs of theatergoers, exiting the theaters and file like insects to the stores and restaurants to continue their night of entertainment. They know just where to go.

But I follow the Flow. The current that ebbs and eddies and has tidal surges and is everything and nothing and somehow is the world I was born into. And yes I exist here.

This is my story. This is the story of a slider. This is my story of what that can do to a person.

Scene 1 - Infancy

Starbursts. Points of light shimmering. Wavering with a low sound rumbling and resonating like the deep bowel chants of the Buddhist Monks high their temples in the Himalayas . Monks in saffron robes and heads of stubble. Monks searching for peace. Monks resonating the Flow. That sound is everywhere. Sometimes it soothes me to sleep and sometimes I just want to get away from it all. But I can't move. My muscles have not been developed. I am stuck here, helpless with my mind free to inform and torment. I don't understand anything. I understand everything. I see a constellation of points of light. Some white, some green, some red. They slowly twinkle. On comes a light. Off goes another. I try to follow the motion. Try to predict the pattern as if it might be some form of communication trying to tell me something. The smell of pine is around me. Music softly carols around me as voices are harsh somewhere around me. In another room. My parents. I know the voices. Yelling, coming closer. My mother begins to cry between her loud words. Door slams. Then another. I focus on the lights. The smell. Anything but the harshness.

Scene 2 - Six

Sitting on a hill in a park at a YMCA day camp. Group of youngsters making crafts and doing science experiments and lacing leather wallets to give to our dad's on father's day. As I lace I notice something unusual. I can see my eyes seeing. I can feel a presence in my eyes. I close the left eye and see the wallet, needle, rawhide strip, table in front of me. I see the thirty or so other 6 to 8 year olds who are also making crafts for the patriarchs of the family. I open the left eye and feel that strange presence still occurring. I close the right eye and, holy shit, my six year old mind thinks as I see a world I never thought to see before.

The sky is the same, slightly darker. Slightly more indigo. The air smells sharper, more minty , the whole world has taken on a darker hue and a slightly sharper focus. The sound is gone, in fact, most of the people are gone. The picnic tables are still stretching out in front of me, with no campers, no crafts. The air has a inverse quality to it, I can feel it filling my lungs and I can hear the silence and it is deafening. That low guttural moan of the chanting monks is there on a very low frequency. Along with the most beautiful being singing a light aria in the shower somewhere in the heavens. There is the sound electricity makes and I realize that it's not electricity. It's energy. I'm hearing the worlds energy.

Down the table, three quarters of the way to the end. I see one person I know. Dale, the junior counselor is down there staring at me. Seeing me. Seeing me in this world His head is just slightly cocked to the left and one eyebrow tilts at an angle that tells me that we've opened quite a can of worms here.

From the periphery I see the woods around the pavilion start to quiver with motion. Living beings start to slink out in all matters of being. Lizard like amphibious creatures in puce pink with three triangular toes lope over some low brush searching me out. Humanoid creatures with their appendages on backwards so that they travel like a spider on four legs climb out of the trees.

Furry small bean shaped creatures in blueberry hop to us, the feet on their two stubby legs facing with the toes pointing backwards. The creatures all come forth, inquiring. Peering. Then I see her. She is like me, I instantly know. Black hair and penetrating eyes. Skin the color and texture of bone. Elegantly long arms and fingers.and legs. She wore a long simple black dress to her ankles, arms covering down to her wrists. Around her waist was something. Around her neck, another. Her mouth began to quiver in movement. Her left arm begins to raise. She is speaking, to me. She is reaching out, to me.

I open my eyes.

The world is back the way it was. The noise of thirty children milling amongst themselves. Thirty children filling their days with play and sunshine and peanut-butter sandwiches while waiting for their mom's and dad's to get off from their day at work and come to collect them. I close my right eye again but nothing changes. The feeling that something is pressing in on me is gone. I look around but see none of the changes of the otherworld. Everything is exceptionally ordinary and I am simultaneously relieved and confused. About three quarters down the picnic tables Dale is starting at me. Completely still he observes what the blond haired girl named Emily is doing. She is looking startled, confused. She blinks and turns her head from side to side as if she is expecting something. From somewhere.

Scene 3 - Sex

Dale is 16. He has opened to a path, or rather a path has opened to him. The year is 1977. The place is Cuyahoga Falls , Ohio . He has a summer gig at the Gorge Park YMCA day camp as a junior counselor for the youngest group of campers, the 6 to 8 year old group. He likes being a counselor. The kids are funny little beings, just emerging from the safety of their family homes and beginning to stabling some social codes of their own. He enjoys observing their antics. Today though, today something happened with one of them. A six year old girl named Emily was doing craft and caused a veil to disappear. He found himself in an alternate version of the camp, more deeply wooded and inhibited by all sorts of monstrously wonderful creatures who came out to take a look at her. At least he things they were coming to see her, they just as easily could have been coming to eat her. He had been practicing magick for over three years and he knew that he was doing well in his studies. He had established contact with daemons from . well he didn't really know where they came from, only that they seemed to be impressed with his abilities and gave him lessons to help him increase his power. There was also this old dude with white hair and a long overcoat who appeared like a ghost to him, usually with the help of some LSD, and set him straight on any number of magickal systems. He spent hours conversing with the old guy and the ghost gave him sigils to make and tasks to help him become, something more.

That night he needed to practice. He wanted to tell these guys what he experience today at the came with the blond child. He arranged the room with the brass bowl with the salt, the oil with the blood from the squirrel he shot with his air gun a year ago. The pentacle star scratched into a flat of plywood he found behind the house. He took of his clothes and dabbed the oil onto himself. He lit incense and sage and got the room damn smoky with thick intoxicating incense. He smoked some of the week he got from Jasce last week and had some music playing on the hi-fi in his room. The room began to pulse, the week was taking effect, he closed his eyes and let his eyes lull back into their sockets. His body rocked gently on his thighs he began to breathe feeling the energy riding through him. He pulled his penis out of his drawers with his right hand gripping it thoroughly in his hand felling it pulse and pull with the new beat of energy. His left hand took a drop of oil form the bottle and let it fall on the head of his cock and roll down the backside. Into his fingers as he moved the hand up and down on his cock. He knew the rhythm needed, he let go and used the combination of being high from the weed and the current of the magical energy he had tapped into to bring him into a controlled frenzy of pulse and pound and pull. The rhythm produced a rhapsody that what natural and the threads and tendrils of the netherworlds began to pull at him. Wrapping their ethereal arms and legs around him until he could feel them sucking him into them. He threw his arms out and fell forwards seeming to copulate, penis completely erect into the invisible lover. He glisten with new sweat pouring from him, his sandy brown hair fell tussled in his face, tendrils of locks fastened to face as his rocked back and forth into something that wasn't there. His ecstasy must be contained. He must ejaculate with the focus to bring forth the fissure in the world. To tear the very fabric of reality so that his friends could come out and converse. He felt the discorporal lover lick at his skin and scratch his back and suck, oh such sucking at his root. Pulling him deeper and deeper into whatever it was. With one last breath drew deeply, then hissed out between his teeth in a pure reverie his focused on the imagined wall of his temple. He breathed energy into his sigil on the wall and it glowed with white hot energy. The as he poured his seed out into whatever it was that was fucking him, he took his hands and pointed them as if he held a knife in front of him and slashed an opening in that sigil wall.

Spent, he thrust himself forward and presented himself in a tortoise-shell bow as he gathered his senses around him. He captured his breathing. He bore down in his pelvis to make every speck of his semen fall forth onto his consecrated ground. The sounds began to suck into themselves, the vibration increased and the high-pitched sound of a concave scream funneled out of the wall in front of him. Smoke, more smoke than possible with a thickness that would choke him blanked him. The sound of a gong somewhere rang out and then with a staccato stop any band leader would be envious of, it all grew silent.

Out, from the rift, on the waves of the energy which had torn open a paradigm, Odan stepped. Dust gray he shook off the debris of the crossing from his oilskin over cloak and his dust-brim hat. He peered at the figure presenting in a child's pose in front of him and commanded him to rise.

In the hours that followed Dale told Odan of his experience that day with a small child who by closing one eye at a time seemed to change the world into something else. Odan listened carefully. Remembering tales told long ago of the mating of gods and exiles and their spawn which grew in the shard realms of the Qlippoth. Some grew into unfathomable monsters, incapable of thought or communication. Some grew into beguiling charmers who were always the root of their own unmaking. All of them held vast reserves of untapped power. Power that could be honed and utilized by the right master.

Odan carefully explained what Dale needed to do to increase his own power. Indeed he did this considerably well being that what was required was quite akin to child rape. Odan explained that this wasn't a real person but a vessel of energy that has presented itself to him for a challenge. Could Dale contrive some manner of thought that would allow him to initiate and complete sexual congress with the vessel that looked so much like a small girl? Over the evening, Odan was quite certain that he has gotten the boy to come around to his way of thinking. He salivated at the potential that was about to erupt.

The following day. Dale sidled up to the girl, who didn't seem to remember anything unusual about the previous day. He became her friend. Her cooler, older, wiser friend and she enjoyed the time they spent together at the camp. Her other friend Jenny grew more possessive and competed for her attention by trying to distract Dale. Sitting on a hill overlooking a game of tug-of-war in which Emily had already been excluded, he asked her if she wanted to screw.\

Emily looked at him unknowing. She didn't know what that meant. So he picked up a stick from the ground and thrust it's end into a mole-hole between him. She looked with that otherworldly look at him and he shivered. He felt the stare go right through him and for just a moment he felt unwashed. At that moment a counselor called them off the hill and into the game for another round.

That night when Emily got home she played in the back field of the family farm, fetching water from the pitcher pump as her Irish setter dog, Rogue lapped the clear water pouring from the pump eagerly. In her bath she asked her mother how you screw something. Her mother offered an explanation in the form of a screw and a screwdriver and something to fasten together. Emily said that wasn't what she thought he meant. Her mother told her just to tell "him" no.

The next day Emily did just that. She told Dale

"No". The little girl said defiantly. Her arms crossed in front of her osh-gosh-bgosh railroad conductor overalls. He thought, what do I do now? Then he realized. The information coded into him like a beam of light. He felt the lids of his eyes retract like the lenses of reptiles.

"It's okay. I'll just get Jenny to do it." And with that he walked down the hill towards Jenny

Emily thought for a moment, her crossed arms unfolding in uncertainty. She liked Dale. She liked having Dale as a friend. She didn't want him to go off with Jenny and have them be playing without her. And her alone.\

She ran off after him. "Wait, Dale."

He heard her call and the reptile stopped.and turned

"Are you ready" he asked the girl with an air of superiority.

"Yeah" she said and followed him.

In the greenhouse off the path she sat on a table that usually held the many flats of flowers and plants that had already been planted in the park. The tables were dusty but clear and the dome of translucent white plastic stretched over metal semi-circles made the air inside the place thick.

Dale looked at her, but said nothing.

He moved to unlatch one of the overall straps

Her eyes followed him and he watched the change occur. The iris shimmered and turned to liquid as a kaleidoscope of color and texture shifted behind the lens. The pupils dilated and then squeezed into tight focus. On him.. Her eyes never left him. Not for a second. She knew, she knew something, but she never made a sound.

Emily has a moment of fear as his penis was pressed between her legs. She felt unbelievable pressure and her breath quickened into something like a silenced sob. Tears welled up in her eyes in a combination of panic and betrayal. Then she felt the presence fill her up. Buffeting her as his form pressed her back letting her sink into whatever it was and she was soothed, and she fell.

Fell back in to the void. A million billion starlit nights combined to usher them into the vastness of space. No, not space, time. Time and space. Space and time. Whatever it was it was everything and nothing and it pressed in to crushing and flattened us out to fine threads which where nowhere and everything at the same time.

In this darkness. In this fall. We existed naked and separate. She was still looking at me. Still penetrating me with her eyes. She spoke one word, never taking those talons of open eyes off of me.

"Why" she asked

"Because I have to" I replied.

And in an instant we were back. Dust wrapped around us as I found my penis flaccid and spend and withdrawing from her being. I felt shame and I instantly turned around and stumbled my way out, buttoning myself up but remembering what Odan had said about keeping it the same.

(Red Gold)