Can’t Not Stare – Writing Prompt #42

I’m stuck on my current WIP for a wide variety of real life reasons that are really just thinly veiled excuses, but I feel the need to create. I didn’t want to let my disinterest with EG’s current scene keep me from writing altogether, though. There’s no rule that says I have to work on EG and nothing else in my writing time, so I’m giving myself permission to free write on anything.

Thus, it is time for a writing prompt.

I got the idea for this prompt while I was reading through Justin Formanek’s website http://www.aberranthology.com/. He’s a wonderful writer of horror fiction, a genre I’m pretty bad at, and I love reading his work. I thought, what better way to be creative then do in a prompt working outside of my normal SF or romance genres? I’m not sure my writing today is truly a horror piece, but I set out with that goal in mind and this is what I came up with.

What’s horrific to you?

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Here’s mine:

I have the urge to cut my belly open.

Every time I look down at it, feel how full and fat it is, I want to amputate it. It’s a symbol of all that’s wrong, all that I’m doing to myself. I imagine slicing it open in one smooth stroke. A cut drawn across its roundness. A smile that releases all the built-up pressure.

Innards burst forth. Dark, green-black innards of I don’t know what. Twisted knots. Ropes of putrid nastiness. They burst forth and my belly empties like a lanced boil spewing its vile infection fluids. Instant freedom from the pressure. The guilt. The self-hatred. My belly hollows out and the mass falls to the floor. Somehow I know it is built up of more than normal intestines. The pile is the size of a volleyball.

Oh god, the release.

I sigh, free. I’ve done it. I’m empty and new. Free.

If only it were that easy. 

I create the image again and again. The clean slice, the emptying, the freedom.

It doesn’t free me. I only imagine me free, like I imagine me exercising or writing or reading or doing anything constructive. Imagining isn’t doing, and the mass inside me grows.

I watch my willful self-destruction like a horrified observer from the backseat. Every day I decide to change it. Every day I make it worse. 

Can it ruin me? Can I catch myself from the slide? Or will it come again and again.

“Come” isn’t right. Nothing comes for me. No outside force inflicts this destruction on me. I create my new old-self, inside out, from a tangle of putrid, black-green innards. 

How will I free me? Can one change at a time buy me back?

Or will it be the slice, the opening of the belly and the spewing forth. The mortal, freeing, oh-I-wish-it-were-that-easy, clean-slate wound.