ADDITIONAL SAMPLE CHAPTER FOR STORYLINE #3
(CHAPTER 4)
What this hierarchical scene lacks in subtlety is more than balanced
by its accessibility. Blatant verticality is often overlooked by humans
because its formation is prevalent to the extent that it has become
accepted at an axiomatic level. The general structure of the image
manifests itself through the depiction of a heap of humans. What's more
important than the immediate cast of characters and their cultural or
racial backgrounds is the emphatic pattern of dominance and
subservience. There are a multitude of intellectual and natural
expressions of this type of ordering, yet the repulsive aura of the
scene is intended to dissuade efforts towards self-augmentation.
At the top of the pile of humans is a fat, smiling, greasy man. His
center of gravity is clearly his bulging mid-section as he sits, slumps,
and reclines on a sensuous, pink cushion which rests atop an ornately
carved, gilded wooden platform. His face droops under the weight of its
cheeky blubber, causing the man's jellied eyes to ooze forward as if
they will fall out. The hair is impeccably groomed, each strand forming
perfect lines with the others, but it appears vapid, instantly dead as
it struggles from each polluted follicle. The grin is relentless, but
it foreshadows the quizzical, perhaps paradoxical smile of a cackling
skull. The finely-tailored pinstripe suit and silk shirt hardly mask the
layers of flowing skin and seem to almost contain the continent of
putrid flesh. Surrounding the man is a puffing, swirling body of misty
toxins, a hovering lattice of smoke emanating from his slurped and
gnarled cigar. His wallowing demeanor discharges a whiff, an essence of
immobilized growth that has degenerated into florid stagnation: facile
strokes of the self which belie the incestuous mingling of fatal forces
and spiritual disarray.
A man stands in the next stratum below. He is garbed in a plain gray
shirt and charcoal slacks. His body and spirit are simultaneously
involved in two separate activities, and yet, his waist, like a
gyroscope that is moving but retains a fixed orientation, provides
enough ballast to sustain this division of attention. Cocked but
slightly lolling and swaying, his eyes focus lustily upward stretching
the surface of his face across promontory-like cheekbones. The strain
expressed in the pulsating veins and taunt muscles of his neck reveals
an ardent striving, thriving, and unyielding determination. His
shoulders appear locked in a state of anticipation - raised and ready
for movement but abnormally positioned. The man's yearning presence
seems awkward and tense, but his energy is sufficiently apportioned so
as not to diffuse the kicking motion of his legs. As if prompted by a
suspicious sense creeping down his spine into his feet, the man
forcefully and incessantly delivers preemptive and severe blows to the
figure underneath him. The energy that flows from his lower half,
striking in apparent anger, is an antithetical surge which hints at the
possibility of deleterious rifts in his divided fibrous sanctum.
The third man appears sullen, paralyzed in a crouch of resignation. He
wears a light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top few
buttons undone. His green pants are clean but thinning from countless
washings. Traces of muscles remain etched in his arms and chest but rest
loosely having lost their vitality from excessive and constant use. The
man's shoulders struggle against gravity to remain upright, but his neck
droops badly and provides insufficient support for his hanging head.
Distant and barely visible, the man's eyes bob wearily in the very
bottom of their ravaged sockets. Ripples of cracked furrows desecrate
and slash across his face, signaling the battered condition of his worn
soul. Supplicant and vanquished, the man receives each strike from above
with a convoluted mixture of denial, sorrow, and acceptance. The fumes
and residue of antidotal imbibing, although unseen, drench him in a
soggy, confused reverie - an opened-mouthed numbness.
The last man, and the one at the bottom of the pile, lies exposed,
face-up, arms and legs tangled. His hair is a matted mess of dirt,
blood, vomit, and small pieces of trash gleaming with a slimy sheen.
Each facial pore is clogged with grime and slowly suppurates a glossy
flow of infected bodily juice. A partially scabbed but infested swath
sears and staggers along the ridge of his jaw and drops precipitously to
his neck, expanding into corrugated shrieking streaks and finally ebbs
within the slant of his collarbone. The outer edges of his eyes are
collapsed in a watery swirl of dilated vessels and purple-black hues.
Wrapped in layers of filthy, tattered clothes, the alternating upward
crawl and subsequent wavering descent of his chest is the only symbol of
life in his stultified body. A despondent longing for finality, an
escape for the soul from its bereaved trudge through hell are the only
wisps of sensation that permeate this phantasmagoric entity of human
tissue.
From top to bottom, the human hierarchy extracts an inexorable stream
of demands and displays its lopsidedly pernicious suffocation of
potential human equality.
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