Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

Old Age.

Today's my birthday. I turned 27.

Oh, shut up. It's a horrible, horrible thing. It's like something out of my worst nightmares.

To make things worse, I've been sick. My throat feels like an army of small goblins are taking turns swinging on my epiglottis. I've been asleep, and awake, and asleep - over and over again - for the last 48 hours. Sleeping when sick is unbelieveably strange. I kept on having wild, manic, apocalyptic dreams - yet I had no idea what they meant, and I didn't seem to be a part of them. I kept waking up, hour after hour, covered in sweat - my head spinning and my tongue clacking drily in my mouth. I'd consider what was running through my head, decide that it was incoherent rubbish, and go back to sleep. Repeat. Over and over.

It's horrible being this old. I have done absolutely nothing with my life. Nothing! Do you know what that feels like? I bet you don't. I bet you live a life of consistent accomplishment and achievement. I, on the other hand, know nothing but the bitter taste of mediocrity.

And now, just to make things even worse, I've become a geriatric.

I knew it would happen. And, today, it was proved to me.

It started out as a fairly ordinary day. I crawled out of bed, throwing my legs over the side, and letting my feet hit the floor. There was a noise, though. A noise that I hadn't heard before. It was a creaking noise - a long, whining groan, and it seemed to escape from all of my joints. I blinked, and stood - pulling on my dressing gown, and walking out to the kitchen.

I reached into the cupboard and grabbed a jar of coffee. Without even looking, I boiled the kettle - but just as I raised the mug to my lips, I noticed something.

I was using decafe!

I dropped the mug, which shattered on the ground. What was happening to me? The room span crazily, and I staggered into the bathroom - resting my hands on the sink and staring into the mirror.

It was happening - right before my eyes.

My eyes... which were turning yellow. Around the edges, the skin was crumpling and folding, tightening itself and releasing. And, as it released, large, floppy bags of drooping flesh remained.

I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Instead - a tooth slid out of my gum and plopped into the sink. I looked down, my eyes wide with fear.

Tooth after tooth began to follow. They rained down in the sink, followed by thick streams of treacley blood. I reached up to catch one, but what I saw caused me to reel in shock. Liver spots - great, thick, brown ones - were exploding on the backs of my hands, and were travelling up my arms.

"My hands...", I hissed soundlessly, "My hands.."

Outside, lightning lit up the sky - accompanied by the loud boom of thunder.

I heard Bronnie's nails clattering against the floorboards, as she zoomed beneath my bed, her paws cupped over her eyes in fear.

I gasped, falling foward. Something was itchy. On my head. I reached up to scratch it, and pulled a ball of thick, wiry hair out of my head. It was grey and greasy, and it slid out with no resistance. I threw it in the sink, where it bobbed next to my teeth.

"Oh, God... no...", I rattled, "My hair.."

The seam up the back of my pajama shirt began to shake and strain, and I bent over, checking it out in the mirror. A thick, chitonous length of bone exploded outward from the back - bristling with thick, black hairs. I reached behind me, and touched them. They recoiled at my finger tips, dancing reflexively atop a crest of yellowish bone.

"My spine.."

I began to vomit, then - filling the sink with the contents of my stomach, as tears rolled down my face. But, it didn't stop. The skin around my fingers and hands began to retract - leaving nothing but the bony imprint of my skeleton, peeking outward from beneath the thinnest veneer of spotted, paper-like skin.

My belly, never the tighest part of my anatomy, began to inflate - and a wave of flaccid, yellow blubber rolled over the crest of my waistband - where it hung, like a wide, hair-covered necktie, obscuring the ground beneath me. I reached down and hefted it, trying to put it back in my trousers - but my hands impotently sank into it.

And my legs began to fail - the muscles becoming weak and doughy, and the bone morphing before my eyes. Soon, I was a whole foot shorter - with large, flabby buttocks that hung beneath my broken, jutting pelvis - and a pair of shattered legs which served as centrepieces for a mess of flapping skin and hair.

And then, the fluids came. As my breath began to increase, and I felt my stomach rise, my eyes became wet with conjunctivitis - the rims of my eyelids were thickly encrusted with a hard shell of yellow mucus. I felt my nose running, and I reached up with a shaking, bony hand to wipe it from my upper lip - but I only succeeded in smearing it around. Looking up, my mouth hanging open and revealing a mess of thick, stringly blood and a few shards of tooth embedded in my slashed, gutted gums, I cringed as wide, straw-like ear hairs began to erupt from inside my head. They were long and coarse, each one matted with a thin layer of clear fluid - and they bowed out of each each ear, pointing towards the ground.

"Please, no... no...", I spat - spray of blood hitting the mirror and running down the glass.

Hair began to erupt from my nose in large, matted clumps, as the rest of my hair fell out of my head.

And then, it was over. I turned my crippled, 27-year old body towards the door and shuffled into the lounge.

It was raining outside. The dark clouds had come.

I sat down in an armchair, and pulled a blanket over my legs. Then, I picked up the remote and turned on the radio, tuning it to A.M talkback. I pulled the blankets up over my legs, and hugged them to my chest. And then, I began to weep. I wept for all the friends who were gone - the ones who didn't make it. I wept for the world that had changed so suddenly. I cried as I thought about those times, so long ago, where I held the hand of a pretty girl as we walked through a field of sunflowers on a warm, warm day. And I thought of all the things I'd never had - all the dreams that I'd never fulfilled. I thought about myself - and how the dream was truly over.

I was 27, alright.

Posted by David at July 6, 2005 04:04 PM | TrackBack