The half eaten face smiles, having crawled along for days.

Always a step behind... Never a falter.

Always so painfully aware of the space.

Days and days... I'm half dead of of contemplation, and the rest of the way of dehydration.

But still dragging along the malnourished flesh... And the dragging behind won't allow for a rest.

The drops drip and useless legs twitch; I can see it even though I will not look back. Confirmation is painful. I prefer the story. I am not the vehicle. The horror is a fantasy, and if it's fake I can believe it.

The air is moist and red and thick with bad intention, and the noises drone eternally the same and they spell your fate out in their ever changing monotony.

But I wouldn't blot them out for the world.

I know they just cover the holes in time we spend cowering in the face of ending and corpses. Better the veil than the truth. A praying person might pity and beg their god for some comfort for the poor bastard to whom vast and true removal from the network fantasy of human life come.

Although they would indeed use no such words, opting instead to claim such revelations insanity and sickness of the faith and mind.

But I can see in their hearts that they rely on that ocean of devouring veiling noise as heavily as any person. They call it the voice of god. They carry their own weight, their dragging adding to the fabric of the veil, reenforcing it against the true nature of life and Death.

But I know Death.

That mutilated form drags along always.

I see the holes in it's flesh, the bone chipped and scraping away and one eye half deflated dangling against the exposed cheek bone. The gristle rots and flakes and fries in the red never-ending. The air grows thicker of it. I breathe it in. It becomes me.

It's what I was made of all along.

And that one still-good eye glints at me with pure desire. It always watches, and it catalogs everything it sees, and the cataloging causes the creation and the wheel rolls on. The grinding melds into the frying and the dragging of dead weight and it all hides the truth, the gaping holes, and I keep my eyes forward and don't EVER look back...

Because I know what I'll see, that grinning mouth falling apart, blood spilling out and a tongue hanging out through a hole in the bottom of the jaw... remaining flesh drawn taut and off-colored sickly in it's dried cracked glory. Giving off the stench of putrefaction, as it cracks further and adds to the din, that ever essential veil over all, hiding from our eyes the end. The Pain. Our own body crawling dead along behind, rotting, over, unsettled and unwilling to stop.

There are no nights there. Only days, and they all amount to the same. And they are only the ends of days. Just the ever shifting yet never changing red horizon of dust and the blacktop stretching off in any direction into the illusion. And that mythological point where the hiway vanishes into the sky is where my eyes remain fixed.

I never look back at my own corpse close behind.