Once, I had a name- something terribly average, I’m sure. It was a gift from parents who thought that their child would follow in their footsteps and become something typical. A baker, perhaps, or a farmer selling carrots at the market. They always did like the neighbor’s farm.
My parents were wrong about who I would be, but their name for me still rolls between my teeth sometimes. It’s the flavor of a memory half-forgotten. I have little need of it now; dead things don’t have names.
It doesn’t take terribly much for humans to die. You can stab them, choke them, crush them, you name it. Get as creative as you want. People are gone in the blink of an eye with very little effort, and even the best healer can’t bring them back from the dead. I envy them that. Death is terrifying until you can never quite reach it, at which point it’s the least terrifying thing in the world.
People call me a hero and a miracle to my face, but I know they speak differently of me behind closed doors. Abomination, they call me. I’m a creature that was never meant to exist, a gangly corpse walking like it forgot how to die. There’s a certain pride in embodying horror, but there’s a loneliness beside it that welcomes the company of a bottle. Regardless of where I go, I am something other. My gods are paltry solace.
Growing up, I was always told that gods were external. My parents wove stories of these fat old men in the sky hurling lightning bolts for a laugh. I believed them then, but I know better now. There certainly are fat old men in the sky, but there are far worse gods in this world that the stories could never dream of. My gods live in my chest and throat; they crackle through my skin in sparks of pain and numbness, press the air through my lungs in a bid to keep me alive. They push the blood through my body because my heart has forgotten how to beat- I don’t remember exactly when that happened, but it’s given out like the rest of me. I think my liver quit first, but my body is too dead to care. I practically bleed alcohol. Being struck by lightning by some fat dude in the sky would be a kinder fate, don’t you think?