The Old Slaughterhouse/ Dangling from the Roots in the Year of the Rat

collage by karolina ossowska

    The old slaughterhouse where there was a dome as of a mosque or synagogue, a circular church of some kind, hanging in the fog just now, it seemed like it would be the best place. I would hang myself from one of those beams since it was only here, in this sacred and profane space, that I would atone for all the murdered meat all the centuries of me have eaten. The personal I was not present but my body in this life would be the only proper offering since it was the only thing I had to give.

    Among the rafters there were heavy wire-cables where the old hooks would dangle once upon a time heavily with the carcasses of the dead. At dawn I went out when the street lamps blinked and shut off one by one and there I went with my blood-red ribbon with the intent to hook myself up, out of reach, and wait for the fall of my personal night. I was wondering of my last breath. I was watching if my last breath would be the intake or the out-gush. Would I be drawn within, collapse, withdraw into myself, disappear into a point. Or would I expire, exit from, expand or dissolve outward. How long would it take to disappear, become nothingness, stop knowing, feeling, thinking?

    Yet even as I was dying I knew full well I was not really dying for I had been dead for a very long time and this so-called suicide, this self-immolation -- just days after the dream of Peter S -- this death was a mere formality. This death in the rafters of the old slaughterhouse was a ritual, a rite of the living who are already dead. For none of the living are allowed to remain alive. The dead are not allowed to remain un-transformed. And it was while waiting, weighing on the red-ribbon that my transformation began, almost without knowing it. For a girl of black hair dressed in sheer black skin as of the mythical bat's wings found me there first dangling and she spoke to me.

    She said she was amazed to see me there because her dream told her to come and yet she could not believe in dreams so easily. Amazed that I was hanging upside down and the blood was draining out of me but with unending flow and that the sun was beneath my inverted feet. She spoke to me then with her moony face beaming. "You must be one of the last believers."

    "I am not sure I believe nor will I be the last unsure or believing, " I said. But I am not sure how I spoke. How I told her I believe in nothing, I cannot say. It's like a dream where whole sentences are within one word already in the other's mind, seed compact with all meaning. "This is perfect for you", she said. After a pause, she continued. "You are perfect for me too!" And we flew to the ground where we lay and kissed. One another. All over. In many places. "What are you lacking," I said, when I felt her need. "Only blood" said she. My feet no longer wings still tangled in the roots of something.

    Meanwhile her dog came around, began nibbling at my feet, what was left of them. I watched but felt nothing and smiled as she shooed the dog away and the sudden movement revealed the dog to be a hugely evolved a rat dressed in the dog's clothing, a rodent eager to eat my flesh. "You must wait! As long as I am alive you cannot! When I am truly dead you can have your way of the rat!"
But truly I felt nothing.

   So I flew back to hang on the red-ribbon hooked there among the rafters. I felt all the shriveling things going crooked while others became smooth and peeled or just became unremarkable and I awaited each of my lovers in the forms of the spirits of living creatures I had myself eaten. And in my waiting I learned to hear the music of the wind inside the fissures of the roof and inside the worm-holed creaking of the rafter beams, the whistled tone and the arthritic friction of the bones of the old slaughterhouse as if they were all my own songs, learned from the inside making it's way out.

  The living dead could not see me yet nor would they ever see me and instead they planned their renovations of the structures, transforming the old slaughterhouse into a market, a pub, bus station, kiosk, then the wholesale demolitions, an office building in it's place etc. Yet there were occasionally some who could see or detect me and they asked me what might be my belief and by what conviction I remained there/here hooked in the sacrificial line. But I always replied, none, none, I have no belief nor any conviction beyond what you detect here in me now. I am this perfect vessel.  A womb of nothingness. A spotless mirror. Those who did not see me were never themselves visible. Perhaps only some fistful of neutrinos hovers, hesitates uncharacteristically, finds subtle hindrance of passage, they alone passing through me come to know me here and learn the songs blown in the worm-hole flutes of the building's phantom structures by the cosmic winds, nameless, origins unknown; although some say they know the secret names of the winds and claim they can summon them by a whisper.

  Tempus fugit. It is only in the last 10 years that the truly strange and trivial things have begun to occur, things without meaning, without future began to unfurl in the rafters as a people impatient with the living forms of the dying came to wait & see what they had no patience nor will to witness, blowing cigarette smoke, vaping, chatting and rattling the ice in their glasses. But soon enough they will leave.

  jg, 2020

collage by karolina ossowska, 2020