Puiblished on the 12th of Squid 157 at F:2:3.
We crept beneath the cracked glass sky, jagged shards glistening as pitch-like blood dripped down the edges. There was a laughing noise—a continuous, manic laughter, echoing endlessly through our skull, spiraling into shapes, twisting itself into a coil. A coil, a rope. No, a creature. Something without legs or wings or teeth but with an impossible maw, and it was hungry. Not for flesh, but for memories, for names, for words. We could not remember whose laughter it was, but the sound dug itself into our bones. We could hear it vibrating in the marrow, a frequency so low it rippled through time itself. We felt cold, molten metal on the tongue, tasting of rust and loss.
We crawled by our side, muttering in phrases that peeled like wallpaper, curling and twisting and flaking away. We held a glass mask to our face, a mask of a mask of a mask, all eyes hollow, gazing into infinity with the absence of something once important but now forgotten. The glass on our mask dripped like liquid, pooling into a trail that followed, sinking into the ground. We could not blink. We could only watch.
“One hundred mirrors and still not a single one of us to be found,” laughed our voice, yet it wasn’t ours at all. Was it us? Or perhaps one, who had no face, no mouth, yet had once been the source of all voices, a living echo. One and us were neither here nor there. Perhaps neither had ever been. Perhaps both were only reflections in the mirror pools, or shadows cast by our shifting mask.
“We know,” we whispered, though our mouth was sealed with thread, thread black as void and alive with tiny spiders that crawled up, in, and through our gums. We were the one with the withered hands, fingers bent backward and inward, curling into endless spirals. We, who sat at the edge of the Abyss, carving symbols that no eye could understand and no tongue could repeat, marking the skinless arms of all who dared approach. We knew nothing. We knew everything.
A wall appeared before one and us, and it was vast and covered in eyes. Eyes that blinked in perfect synchrony, eyes that bled ink, eyes that watched without seeing. We reached to touch one of the eyes, and the pupil expanded, swallowing our hand, pulling us inward until we were falling, endlessly tumbling through a labyrinth of flesh and teeth and bone. In the distance, a voice, hollow as it was, began to chant, and we knew it was the voice of one, the heartless one, the mother without a mouth. One sang a lullaby with no melody, words dripping down like cold oil, thick and suffocating, sliding over our skin, binding our limbs.
Our body began to fragment, piece by piece drifting apart, and yet we felt whole, more whole than ever before. Each piece, each fragment, was a new us, each laughing and singing the song of one, each screaming with the voice of one, until the air was thick with us, all us, yet none truly us. A hundred thousand us looked up at the cracked sky, and each saw something different, something forgotten, something dead, something never alive to begin with.
We rose from beneath the earth, a shadow with fingers too long, fingers that whispered against the skin like leaves blown in a dead wind. We carried a box, a box sealed with tongues, tongues that flickered, searching, tasting the air. Inside the box was the heart of one, the weeping star, who fell a hundred years ago into the sea of ash and had never stopped sobbing. We held the box high, and every one of us felt the pull, felt the ache in the bones, the desire to consume the heart of one, to taste the sorrow, to drink the despair until all was nothing, until each of us was reduced to dust.
But we laughed, a sound like stones grinding together, teeth snapping, bones breaking, and our laughter summoned the Faceless One, the one that was never us and never us, the one that lurked at the corner of every eye, the one that whispered lies into dreams, the one that wore everyone’s face yet had none. We opened the box, and the Faceless One slipped out, but the heart of one was gone. In its place, a mirror, a mirror that reflected nothing, a mirror that stared back, cold and empty, a void with no name.
One by one, every one of us began to unravel, like threads pulled from a tapestry, each thread spiraling into nothing, each thread vanishing into the mirror, each echoing the endless laughter of one, the mother without a heart, the mother without children, the mother that never was.
And then, silence.
Only we remained, clutching the mask, the mask that no longer fit, the mask that melted and fused and became part of our face. And in the distance, one smiled, and the cracked sky split open, revealing nothing, nothing at all, except the memory of laughter.