Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

tered possibilities, broken plans, and wasted work. Yet he could feel that
the real cause of the fracture lay far beneath these desperate grasps at
rational cohesion. How many faces can you wear before you forget your
own? The role had been a game based on an ideal that did not exist in
reality. Formulated and preconceived. Samantha had merely been playing
the role she had been given. We all had. It was not a familiar face
that returned his questioning stare.
“This is the biggest joke I’ve been part of. A cosmic joke,” he said,
watching his lips moving in the mirror, amazed at how much they felt
like rubber. Certainly not a part of him at all. The sudden thought of cutting
them off flashed through his mind. It wasn’t his lips that he wanted
to cut off though. He wanted to cut her out of him, cut away his past with
her, amputate it like a limb. Bleed her out of him. Yet, like his consciousness,
she didn’t exist in one part. She wasn’t his foot or his arm.
And neither was he. To kill her, he would have to kill him.
There was the sound of dripping water. He looked down at the floor to
see drops of blood splattering scarlet across the white tiles. His nose was
bleeding.
Cursing his luck, he grabbed some tissues and sat down, tilting his
head back to slow the flow of blood. The red stain quickly consumed the
tissues until they too were just giant blood clots in his hands. Still the
flow didn’t relent.
“When it rains, it pours…” he said, still performing for someone in
the mirror. The tissue against his face made it rather hard to speak.
A humming sound issued from the floor itself. He looked around,
suddenly frantic. The humming grew louder, until it was a deafening roar
that blotted out even the sound of his own thoughts. He got to his feet
shakily and staggered over to the mirror again, the blood continuing to
pour from his nose.
There was something about the room that seemed wholly synthetic,
like he had been taken out of the real bathroom and placed in an imitation.
He looked out the window and heard the howling of the wind, the
barking of one of the mastiffs in the driveway sharply attacking and then
fading away. Something was certainly not right. It was all brittle, fake,
and far away. He could feel harsh gazes burning into his neck—the synthetic
bathroom was a display. He was on display.
His entire face was now covered in blood. The walls were screaming.
He had to grip the sink for balance. And something was flowing from the
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