In love...with a brain eater

“I did what I could…what else could I have done…may be nothing.” Manish, a twenty six years old boy with blue eyes, was staring at the mirror. He was both furious and sad. His hair was untouched since countless weeks, his cloths were untidy and face was pale. The dark circles just below his blue eyes were indicating his irregular sleeping habits. Apart from it, his face was hidden under the uncontrolled growth of his beard. His otherwise robust body had become lean and starved.

“It is hard for you I know…”He contin

ued talking with the half broken mirror, “It is hard to forget her infectious smile and unexplainable warmth. It is hard to forget the depth of her incredibly beautiful eyes and it is hard to forget her divine voice which used to make you high without any weed whatsoever.”

He looked at the little digital watch tied on his wrist. His breath was becoming heavier and tears had started to gather in his eyes, ready to pop out any second from those rusty corners of the eyes. He looked at the watch again and wiped the saline water with the sleeves his shirt. Meanwhile various thoughts kept on tumbling one after another and his heart continued to pound hard in his ears.

For outer world it was a mundane day. He could hear the peddlers shouting about different things they were trying to sell and the sound of car engines getting started, as the office going people made their way to the parking.

“She was one crazy bitch, grown up in UP with high ambitions and rather twisted ways to accomplish the things. One of the most admired and brilliant student of all time. She was a scholar…but I don’t know why she went to South Africa and brought this fucking shit with her. This is the end of her agony.”

He turned towards the bathroom to take bath. While bathing he suddenly started singing a very old song from the film ‘Anand’.

“Zindagi kaisi hai paheli haye…..”

He sang passionately, but none of the wordings or the tune was correct, however finally, his voice caught some nodes and, he left the bathroom. He felt as though he was going to do something horrendous. But technically, he had just been singing a great song in a lame voice. That doesn’t seem much of a crime, does it?

He went again to the mirror and picked up the razor lying near the wash-basin. He checked the blade and started shaving off his beard. Soon his face reappeared from a long banishment under the dark, thick beard. He combed his hairs and headed towards the bedroom. He took out and threw a pair of fine shirts and neat pants from his closet on his bed. After thinking vividly about the color combinations and matches, he took a pair and started to get dress. Once he was ready, he went near the closet and quickly kept something inside his pants pocket.

He saw a glimpse of himself in the mirror and murmured, “I wish you could say for the final time that you knew I was in love with you; a memory you could recall and say that you liked sitting by the stairs of the apartment in stealth with me. You and me, with our hot cups of tea and our warm bodies in Deadly December…I just wish.”

He moved into the inner store room. The room was as dark as the black hole. The sun-rays were abandoned outside but restricted from there. The smell of blood and rotten flesh was possessed deep down the walls of that room. There was torn moss in this air, fallible wisps of death and gore. He stepped into the room quietly, throwing a quick smile at nobody and stood near the door. He switched on the light.

“Hi, honey,” he smiled, stretching on a cheery face as he approached her. His neck looked long and bare in the absence of his top shirt button. It made the scar that ran across his throat more prominent.

There was a girl tied in the chains and bars. The chains were mounted on the wall, giving the girl a very limited movement area. There were pieces of flesh and blots of blood all over the room. Little maggots had already made that room their paradise. Most of them were feeding on the pieces of flesh and a few daring ones were trying to feed upon the girl’s flesh, the girl, who was apparently alive.

“How are you today? The scattered meat pieces are suggesting me that you didn’t have your breakfast properly…why is that so? Are you trying to break my heart?”

There was no response from the girl. She was constantly busy in killing the moving maggots.

“Am I looking good today?” He continued, “Today your agony will end. I have decided to end your obsession…do you hear me Manisha?”

Suddenly the girl looked at Manish. Her face was sunken in, eyes unfocused and completely white. Her mouth twitched and drooled as if craving for something, anything, which even sounds like flesh, meat or blood. The smell of her rotting face was complementing the aroma of the room. Her nails were dark and bloody, but no blood was dripping from them.

“Your eyes are still deep…and your lips red like rose petals.” Manish glared at her with love in his eyes.

Love is complicated. Once a wise man said that it perhaps does not happens with the person but the image. But here the original image of the girl was long gone. She was nothing now but a pile of rotten flesh moving on the structure of bones but still Manish was in love with her.  

“I wish you would not have gone to SA for the research of the epidemic…I just wish. You brought that virus here with you. I have seen you transforming into a flesh eater cannibal from a sophisticated girl…but I told no one about this. As you lost control over you, I fed you everything I could.”

He unbuttoned the shirt and moved a bit near to the girl. His shoulders were badly injured, as if, flesh was cut from there. The blood stains were completely dried up and clotted.

“See, I even fed you my own flesh. But now I am too finding it hard to keep my mental balance going. The virus inside you is making me sick too. I am slowly feeling the thirst of blood and hunger of flesh. But I will not allow it to control me anymore.”

He stood just outside the reach of the girl. He took a pistol out of his pocket. It was black with a sticker of a heart pierced with an arrow pasted on the grip frame. He unlocked the safety grip and checked the magazine.

He did love himself because people who do not love themselves can only adore others, because adoration is making someone else big and us small. They can only desire others, because desire comes out of a sense of inner incompleteness, which demands to be filled. But they cannot love others, because love is an affirmation of the living and growing being in all of us. He loved this girl…unconditionally.

“I love you.”

He took a deep breath and looked at the roof of the house. His eyes started swimming in emptiness and his brain became incapable to think. He left his body to fall on his knees and drops of tears rolled one after another from his eyes. He raised his hand with the pistol and aimed at the girl. He opened his mouth to say something but words didn’t support him. A small amount of saliva slipped from his mouth to the neat shirt. With a silent scream he shot a bullet which pierced the head of the girl. The slash of blood oozed out of her head and within a second, another bullet was shot from the same pistol, the target was different, it was Manish himself. He killed himself.

The next morning a suicide note was found in the room addressing his parents.

‘I didn’t want it to happen…but it happened. It wasn’t that hard. I felt no pain as love had made me numb already.’