I, Jason Sosak, woke one morning from the uneasy dreams I had been having to find myself transformed into a giant insect. I was lying on my hard (as it was armor-plated) back and lifted my head to find that the rest of my body had been dissected into the sharp, arched segments, the sort which might keep me cool in the heat and dry in the rain. I found that my legs, now that I was in the body of an insect, had been shrunk down well beyond their usual, already stumpy length. To put it bluntly, this was a huge bummer of a thing to wake up to.
If I had not spent so much money for today, if it were up to me, I would have stayed in bed. This felt like a very good day to stay in bed and order in Taco Bell. Perhaps, if I had the cash, I would have tried to call a doctor, an optometrist or whatever the word was for someone who fixes bugs. A veterinarian was for cats, I knew that much.
But today was not about me. It was up to the Next me, the Myself of the Lived Future. I was to form to that me’s desires of synergistic optimization. Today was seminar day. Youngsmen do not miss a seminar. Not when Michael is speaking in person, and not when they have spent so much money for tickets to the man himself.
I looked up at the portrait of one Mr. Michael Young, which had been hung up on my wall for quite some time. It had been with me through all my greatest successes: my stint as employee of the month, the half marathon I ran, and the four 5k races that I had run afterwards, which got me around 75% of the way to having run the full marathon. Michael Young had been the one who had inspired all of that progress. The conquering of my infantmind. The creation of my optimized self, the finding of my Next Self. And just as he would have, on a day as important as today, I got out of bed, pressing my gnarled, reedy legs towards the ground, knocking over my bedside table in the process.
Within me, looking at my small, shattered fortune of imagined futures from my ugly new eyes, I felt a trickle of something close to joy.
It wasn’t joy. Joy is what happens at the hedge that separates laughter and realization. This was something more akin to the relief one feels when urinating. It was a dribble of endorphins or something endorphin equivalent– a feeling that was sacred and fecal. A shudder ran through me and the thick bristles that ran down my legs fluttered.
The door was closed, which was a thing of dread. A bedroom door has inexplicably never been given due credit for how much of life it is able to stop. In the turn of that handle and the air beyond, on most days, was fear. A sort of pre-agoraphobia. Once I crossed that threshold, life existed. My poverty and loneliness existed, as did my mother and her questions about when I would get back on the dating scene (‘It’s been ten years since she passed, after all’). There was the empty chair where my father used to sit and watch football games before the heart attack and the fact that my mother had taken recently, on occasion, to ask when I thought he would be home for dinner. The door, still baring the ‘Fuk Alexandra’ that I had carved twenty some years ago with a penknife was still visible through the paint.
To leave was an acknowledgement of what people saw when they saw me. To leave was an acknowledgement of my hairline and my eyebags and my the fattening of my torso despite my best efforts to keep it static. It was an acknowledgement that my only companionship was from a cat which had been left by my late wife, and of a reminder of my destitution. It was a reminder that despite the efforts of my parents, and of Samantha, and of the thousand people who had worked so hard to make me into something, and that I had managed to become valueless. To leave everyday, which I did only for the late shift and for the run that would follow, was an acknowledgement that the world at large existed, and that the best portion of this world had tried it’s best to raise me and that I had failed it and that I had failed them.
Today, however, the door seemed quite easy to open. It shattered around me as I punched through it, the pressure of my calcified skull against the wood sending shards flying everywhere.
Today was, after all, the seminar.
***
The odor that greeted me as I ascended the stairs was of the same genre of salt and sour that vinegar on fries is to a drunk man. Its pungency was the only thing that seemed able to crack through the grey-black morose of my current state of consciousness. I followed the stench, up and towards Mr. Mittens, and without any sentient thought, much as a clock consumes our time, and time consumes our death rattle, I consumed Mr. Mittens.
***
Shit. Fuck.
I just ate my fucking cat.
I realized, in the moment after my hunger was momentarily sated, that all that was left of the nineteen year old cat, the last breathing reminder of Samantha, and of Samantha’s laugh and clavicles and cancer, was the piss stain on the withering, scrotum-skinned discrepancy’s bed, and the salt and the sour that it had left behind.
So I did not eat my cat, I guess. I ate the cat of my late wife, which would have felt worse if it didn’t feel so okay.
If I’m being honest, and a Youngsman is honest, it felt fine. Pretty much just like eating a burger. Or sweating, I guess. Or using the restroom. There was a certain inevitability to it. The cat was going to die soon. It probably should have died a few years ago. It was only the enormous vet bills which ate through most of my meager paychecks which had kept its hateful skeleton alive. It was best this way. He hadn’t even looked up before I had swallowed him. I could feel by the expansion in my middle that already he was becoming smaller. There was no quicker form of death than what I had been able to give him. That was something to be proud of, I suppose.
I stared in the mirror, which my mother had insisted on putting in front of Mr. Mittens so that he felt as if he had company.
And if I’m being honest, and a Youngsman is always honest, I felt good. Physically it felt fine. The death of Mr. Mittens that was. Good even. A new portion of my continuity, of my virality and strength even, but this was also an acknowledgement of something I had known for quite sometime but had been unable to say while Mr. Mittens existed.
I hated that cat. I had always hated that cat.
I think I kept Mittens alive because I felt some sort of obligation to Samantha. It was a safety. A sign that I, Jason, was still a good man, or a man in mourning, or a man who cared about a dying cat that he hated. I cared about it so much that I had brought it three extra years of unwanted life, and of the pain that came with it. I cared so much I had let it experience its fur falling out and its bones creaking. I was a good guy. A man who held on, even when it hurt, because holding on was good. Even though nobody had asked me to. Even though I am fairly sure that on some level Samantha had also hated Mr. Mittens.
And so I am fairly sure what I had done was good. Perhaps. Probably.
And if I’m being honest, (which if you’ll remember the rule, I should be) it was as I peered into Mr. Mittens’ now vacant mirror, that I felt, for the first time in a long time, some sort of confidence.
The thing about being a man, or about being an adult, or about being from Texas, or maybe it was just the thing about being me, is that it is hard to admit something painful has happened until it is done happening, and for a long while I had felt like nothing because I was done with nothing. And in terms of productive capacity I was shockingly close to nothing. I was no use to anyone. I was of less worth than a hammer or a lightswitch or a keyboard. I was a mooch who lacked even the utility to look a stranger in the eye, or to look myself in the eye. When Sam was alive I had, for a while, had documentation that I was of some use to somebody, to anybody. That I had been chosen. Not only chosen but chosen by someone who was smarter than me and kinder than me and who could navigate office parties and family reuninons and everything else that I found disorienting. And a while ago I had lost that utility. And now I had it.
You can say a lot about a cockroach, and say even more about a cockroach that appeared to be around four feet long at the thorax, but in the mirror, in this body, I was useful. I was pragmatic. This body, devoid of bells and whistles, all fat and hair and curvature was prehistoric. It was pre-prehistoric. I was as close to eternal as Earthbound life could be. My form was to life what cold is to everything else.
But today was a seminar day, and so today I had to keep moving. A Youngsman always prioritizes (rule 6), so out the door I went, much in the same way that I had left my bedroom, exploding out into the sunlight.
If one had ever felt a sun form and explode out from the inside of their eyes, one might know what it feels to experience the direct Dallas sun, from the eyes of an insect. And so, in the same way I consumed Mr. Mittens, I entered the underworld.
Even in my more horizontal form, it is difficult of something of my current size to fit down a storm drain, and if I was not remarkably strong now, if I was not bulletproof and able to bend the iron and break the concrete of a drain like that, I may have been stuck in a place that is not meant for me, a place of daylight.
Ten hours ago, or fifteen hours ago, or twenty hours ago, if you had taken me from the mild warmth of the Dallas November into the steam and dark of the sewer beneath it, I would have been upset. Probably would have said something about it. Used a few choice words even. But that was before I knew the pleasantries of the right type of reek. We do not have enough ways to turn and flex our tongue to vocalize what cacophony feels like when its made this pretty.
***
To say that I smelled the sewer would not be right. I thought the sewer, via the pretext of my newfound surroundings. There was food for a million lifetimes, a billion mates, all of whom were to me available if I could just figure out how, all of whom I knew of, I was aware, the air a mycelium of their fragrance.
And more than that. If I’m being honest, I was happy because for the first time in a long time, I was in charge. Not just of me. I was in charge, and there was nothing else anyone could tell me about it. This home was my own. I would have to fight nobody, not the landlord, or the manager or the salesman. This, this home worth billions, paid for by people too soft or unable to see it for what it was, this was my home now. There was no Samantha, and no memory of Samantha and no echo of Samantha, no fear, no father or fatherlessness. None of the plodding humdrum of a white noise justifying itself outside my window, and none of my belief in the utility of that noise.
But today was seminar day, so I could not linger. I had a seminar to get to.
I got to the seminar by following the reek of desperation, by the odor of men convinced they had unearned their lives. The soft. The vulnerable. The too weak to quit or cry or talk. Those so bent on hardening themselves they forgot that flesh is soft. I followed that reek through the sewers. And when I knew I had arrived, I waited, my feet on the ceiling of my new home, for the vibrations of their floor to slow. So I knew that they were seated. So I knew that the masses of them were listening. I waited for their silence before going through the nearest storm drain and through a glass paned door, into the conference center.
It is easy to sneak into a seminar for Youngsmen. Their wet-clay consciousness is focused so deeply on impressing people who’ve long since stopped being impressed that they were capable of completely missing a four foot long, two-hundred pound insect crawling along the walls and ceilings, taking chunks of plaster as I went.
There is a small pang where guilt should be. Last night, upon my arrival on my dented twin XL mattress, I was one of these men. I would have been in the crowd desperately trying to make a friend. I drank the same goops and granules that they did. In mourning ten years after. A mom I couldn’t take care of. A cat I hated.
I practiced their same various breathing disciplines, learned about martial arts for some reason. I ran and ran and ran. And I knew I was running towards nowhere, or I would have known if I had let myself know it, but I was unable to let myself know it, and now that I knew it I couldn’t unknow it. So I hated these men because I knew how worth hating they were.
I told myself that this newfound lack of guilt must be some side effect of me turning into a primordial being. My circuits must have gotten rewired. But if I’m honest I don’t think it was that. Well it was probably partially that, but also something else.
This was the realization of the same indistinct fantasy that I had had when a nameless eight grader pulled down my pants at the bus stop and ran home. This was the vitriol that one allows themselves to imagine having because they are convinced they will never have the chance to use it. Only now it was not directed at a fellow eighth grader or a teacher, it was the sort of mindless, unembodied anger at authority or death or my previous lack of having been given either. It was a hate at anything weak enough to resemble myself. And that didn’t bother me so much in my new form. And as a Youngsmen, I had taken it to a seminar, as I would take, from now on, to the sewers.
***
The event had started in earnest shortly after I got there. The Rogaine scented masses all arranged in parallel lines looking towards Michael Young holding onto his every word with more voracity than they had held onto any other portion of their life. And Young loved it.
If I had to guess, Young was probably in his late thirties. He had said that he was in his sixties, but he wasn’t and we all knew it and none of us cared because we needed something to believe in. He said that the reason he looked so Young was his adherence to his tenants, and was his willingness to take cold baths and lift weights and run very early in the morning, but the crowd knew that it was probably just because he was in his late thirties.
And even then there was some level of artifice if one looked closely. His waistline had been pushing progressively farther out for the past few years, his hairline farther back until he got the plugs. Crows feet appeared around his eyes. He was still handsome, he was just older than he used to be, a crime for which he could neither atone for or admit too.
But he was still just a guy. A guy in relatively good shape, with a relatively good jawline. But still just a guy. Still a lump of aging flesh. The perfumed mascot of a brand made for men who’s brain rot had reached a critical point. He was their king. The reason they spent their child-support payments on botox and vitamins. There was a cruelty to his candor which I had been too stupid to understand until this morning, too stupid to do anything but admire. This man was a scavenger praying on whatever small and dead and dying things he was big enough to masticate. He was acting on an instinct that surpassed whatever morality he preached, and that morality, in turn, worked something like the fake worm that comes from the mouth of a snapping turtle. He was big and strong because he was big and strong.
I was bigger, and bigger and stronger and bigger and also a.
The crowd grew silent, the silence of their bated breath an ode to their weakness. He stood on the stage in front of them. He was making them wait. Holding a hot wax off their backs. Waiting for them to ask for it. Soon, he would lean into the microphone and greet them. But now, he looked down from the stage, smiling. And with the same instinct with which I had shown up to this seminar, and with the same instinct that I had consumed Mr. Mittens, I had, in a series of indiscrete scuttles and writhings, entered the stage, and taken from the shoulder down, one Mr. Michael Young.
I heard first, the screams of the men and woman in the audience, and I enjoyed them. Honestly. They should be grateful.
I was the God-King of these hopeless, sexless morons. I was not thirty-eight pretending to be sixty. I was their end form. Their primal state. This is what they were vying for. After years of sucking up to the master, after years of spending their bill money on his products, they looked up at me in awe, puking, screaming, crying, their bodies physically incapable of holding in the reaction to my power.
The crowd, the crowd of reeking, putrid, amoebas, spilled out of their chairs and towards their exit, trampling those who had fainted. To know that I used to be one of them disgusted me.
And again, I am finished. Being in the light for this long has left me diminished. It is only the beta-males, the simpletons and weaklings who need this sort of light to see.
I crawl into the sewer. In here, in this trillion-dollar mansion, I am king. I am humanity’s first-made apostate.
I am as the air is. As the stink of sewage has been since heat was made cellular. Fatherless and masterless and without a self-made end.
Duncan Tierney (he/him) lives and teaches in Southern Florida. He his previous work is published in JAKE, Caustic Frolic, South Florida Poetry Journal, the Meniscus Review, and others.
JMWW 