Reflection in a Dirty Puddle (prose poetry)

A lone figure stands, staring into the distance—a woman who still remembers a time of life in bloom, the laughter of children splashing beside their father and grandfather as they started up their boats to chase a hard-earned catch beyond the horizon. She gazes deep into the sea and weeps, while I raise my hand, as though to offer a friendly sign. She does not notice as I approach. My eyes burn red as her scent and her flesh consume me.

Consciousness is a lie. It fractures, shattering and erasing pieces of memory, until I am full, and warm, rust-colored water trickles down my cheeks—sickly sweet and salted, hardening into a nauseating crust.

I look back and see the mangled body of the woman, her blouse torn to rags, her chest disfigured by crooked teeth. Beauty gnawed away. Consciousness is a lie.

The sight burns inside me. I howl in helplessness, hunger rising again. I want to drown, to end this cycle. I hurl myself into the rabid sea, but its waves, battering my pale body against jagged reefs, spit my failed escape back onto the rocky shore. Pain lingers, sharper with every flicker of awareness.

I vomit skin and flesh like a cat coughing up a hairball. It is unbearable—but I am still hungry. I think of returning to the corpse for another bite, but when I go back, there is no corpse. Only black stains on the rocks, and dark trails that vanish into the undertaker’s workshop, where the air reeks of willow and spiced flesh.

I was here. Instinct does not lie. In what role—master, servant—it matters little. I dream of opening the door and hiding in the darkness of its rooms, of sleeping forever. Yet another searing flash splits memory apart, driving me toward a new victim—an old woman convulsing, her jugular vein exploding across my face in a black-red fountain.

My movements are automatic, but I do not control them. I am a puppet, a marionette of instinct. A beast, maddened by the resistance of this frail, dying flesh, feeding it into an insatiable, aching gut. Only when the body goes limp in death do I release it, for in that instant horror returns, and clarity momentarily pierces through the bestial haze. She was weak; her strike with a white cane topped by a goat’s head never mattered to the hunt’s outcome. What have I done? Who am I?

Tears might have granted relief, but they lodge in my eyes like splinters under fingernails, my skull splitting into a thousand shards of memory, each falling like a dying comet into oblivion.

Instead of a scream, a serpent’s hiss escapes my throat—nothing human. I am a crushed viper, writhing in a puddle, trembling in a fetal curl. I try to bite through my own veins, sinking my teeth into my wrist, but from the dark holes seeps no blood—only pain, piercing through me, bending me further into the twisted shape of a crippled hunchback.

My world is cursed. A nightmare-hunger looms like a plague-shadow over this convulsing body, craving, seeking warm flesh. Through it, I hear echoes of the ecstasy of a beating heart—the very heart stolen from me by the universe itself.

Uneven steps drag me through the streets of the crumbling city: sandy walls, narrow alleys, ditches of foul water, roofs rotting with mold. The city itself is dying. The few homes that remain hold fast to their children, shutters and doors barred. Pressing my ear against one door, I hear a crackle I could never mistake—it is not firewood burning, but fear. Somewhere deep inside, a family hides: a mother and her children up in the attic, whispering comfort between muffled sobs; a father sitting at the door with an old gun in hand, chewing tobacco—I hear drops of sweat falling loudly to the floor as I drag a crooked nail across the windowpane. Dawn breaks.

The undertaker’s workshop spares me from the first rays of the sun—scorching, sulfurous, smelling of coal. The sun can sing, and its song is the wail of tortured and murdered children of the earth.

With dirty water I seep down the steps into the dusty cellar, where an old dug grave serves as my only refuge—from the world, from myself. My old acquaintance follows me there—the woman with the ruined chest. She looks at me like a god. She wants to stay close, and she will stay close. She will be my food.

I fall into blackness, where nothing moves, nothing feels, where every thought lies dead. I fall into death itself, freed from hell only until the sun sets again. The earth buries me, packs my grave tight. And when I wake the next night, I will not recognize the reflection in the puddle lit by a streetlamp—such is my curse.