Nightmare Stare [Chapter Five]

Forget what you know, all of it.
Forget it.
Forget the legends your parents and their parents told you about everything. About how the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. About how things live and then, ultimately, die.
Forget that up is up and down is down.
Forget how to feel, forget it all. I’m here to change everything.


I’m outside my house, watering my lawn. I’m just going over my plans in my head and playing with the universe. Only a few more pieces and I’ll be able to actually begin my construction of perfection.
“Howdy, neighbor!” My concentration is broken like a glass bottle hitting pavement.
“What do you want, Mrs. Florid? I ask as she walks past my house carrying her annoying little dog in one arm. She’s covered from head to toe in fur. A gaudy fur coat accompanied by horrid white tights and wretched green fur boots. The worst part is when I look at the little annoying rat she calls a dog. It too, is covered in another animal’s fur as some kind of disgusting evolutionary joke I don’t understand. She stops in front of my yard, her pet barks at me from the comfort of her arms.
“What do I want?” Her face shrivels up like a dying snail. She raises one of her decrepit arms and points it at me, I watch as the leathery skin on her hand stretches nearly to the point of tearing. “Well, that’s no way to talk to an elder!” Her shrill voice makes me cringe and turns the water into ice. I roll my eyes, drop the frozen hose, and walk up to her. The rat growls.
“I don’t like you. I don’t like you one bit. You should forget everything you’ve ever known about me.” Just like that her eyes dilate and she can’t see me. My hose starts working again, so I walk over to it and continue to water. I watch as she looks at the empty lot where my house used to be, I watch her stare right where I am and not see me.
Enough screwing around, its time to get back to work.
On that note I walk back inside my house without turning the hose off. I open the front door and walk down the entryway. I look around at all the old pictures of my old family, I glance at the typical family picture. I’m lying on my side, my ex-wife is sitting behind my torso with a hand on my shoulder, my son is sitting by my feet, and my daughter’s in the middle. All four of us have stagnant smiles on and blank stares covering our eyes. I hate this picture. I hate the matching green sweaters we all were wearing. I hate the hand my ex-wife is touching me with. I hate my daughter’s face, and my son’s entire existence, but I hate most of all is the old me.
I hate the man who was limited by everything and had a passion for nothing. I hate the man who loved nothing but wanted everything, even though he was too afraid to reach out and take it. I hate the man who let his wife cheat on him, the man who let her divorce him. I hate the man who let his daughter go off to college and never come back, I hate the man who let his son become a gay. I hate it all, I hate everything about the life I used to have.
I decide the picture shouldn’t be there anymore, and it isn’t.
I keep walking, and I end up at the garage door. I open it and that’s when the smell hits me. I still haven’t got used to the smell of death. I flip the switch to my left and the whole garage flickers to life. I look at my machine, and I marvel at its greatness. I look at the pieces and begin my work.
I take the head of a girl I met at a liquor store, she was too pretty for those cigarettes she was buying so I had to step in and have an intervention. I set the head on my work bench, head back over to the pieces and grab the pair of astonishing green eyes and set them inside of the head. Next is the tongue, after that the ears. I add the nose, and add the new jaw, I add the neck, the throat, and the vocal chords. That’s all I can add for the time being. I hook the brain to a pump and pump blood to it and the rest of the head, I do a similar thing but with air, more for the blood not for her.
Now this is going to be the tricky part, getting it started. I take a pace-maker I found in the body of an old woman I used for the heart. See, at first I thought it might be better to use a heart with a pace-maker in it, but I was later overcome with the logic of: what if the pace-maker works for the heart but I still am unable to power the brain. So this is my trial run; this is where history will be made. I put the pace-maker on the brain, I’ll wait to close the head again, after it works.

Three.
Two.
One.

A surge of electricity flies through the head, and her eyes open. She looks at me, her eyes focus on me and she says,
“Who are you?”


-Sir Jestro