Parasite

Cyrus watched it from the window. The dark shape ambled over the hills in the distance, outlined by the rapidly blueing sky. Now, the trees assumed their shadowy facades and the purples of the horizon dipped into the oranges and yellows of the sunset. The colors blended together in one watercolor mass that transcended his art classes at The Academy. His imagination seemed to draw the creature nearer; the more he feared it the closer it got. No sound came from the being, but it’s roars echoed through his chest and exploded into shards of red that threatened to tear him open. Cyrus refused to look away from the creature. 

The fur was not black, rather it was made of shadow. It drew in light like a black hole. Around it time contorted into monstrous shapes that Cyrus could not begin to comprehend. He starred in horrified fascination as the creature absorbed the landscape around him. His world grew ever more split the closer the monster got to him. He could stop it’s arrival, yet he did nothing. Cyrus only watched and waited. 

Looking back, I’m not sure whether he wanted the monster to come or if he simply did not know he had the power to prevent its approach, but either way his life was cut short in a matter of hours. The boy was consumed by the creature along with the trees surrounding him. His bedroom window was the first to go and he made no move to run as his arms stretched to the monster’s rules of time. I should have helped him—could have helped him—but I knew better. That boy was as good as dead the second he was born. Too much power with not enough time. He was on our list for years before the Split, but it was only as I watched the sky fold and the colors drip into nothingness that I realized what he had become. He was ready to go. That’s what I believe. That’s what I want to believe. Too much of him was transformed into the bleeding mass that would consume him despite what his mind would believe. He knew; he had always known it would end like this. Maybe he did not want to go, but some part of him—the ancient part of him—had planned for this moment. This particular boarding school, this particular room, this particular weather that forced one to stare out the window and watch the colors melt into each other. His words had a way with people. He could say a few lines, innocent and charming and manipulative, and the world would be his. He did not even know he was doing it, yet it worked flawlessly. 

He was two people in the end. The host and the parasite. They worked in tandem, but the host was lost to the life that controlled it. They always are, aren’t they. He was sucked dry by a creature older than the black holes with whom it is so often compared. Older than the painted sky on that night so many years ago. But the parasite never forgets how to feed. His mind was primed for the invasion from the moment he was born. He was never going to have a life to begin with; the creature made sure of that.

I don’t know what happened to the family, all I do know is that their stories are lost to time. We can keep pages and pages of memories, but only so far as the hosts go. Once the host is gone, we lose contact. The monster is still running, warping time and space to its will, never slowing and always changing. Always prepared to select a victim.